


all hope abandon

by MathildaHilda



Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon Divergence - Ghosts, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, High honour Arthur, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, John sees those they've lost, Moral Ambiguity, Suicide Attempt, When I say major I mean MAJOR character death, bc John is very sad, character tag to be updated as it goes along, it's pretty sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-10-29 04:52:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17801381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: One says that those you've loved and lost are not entirely gone.In John's case, that is more true than for most.***A psychic AU no one asked for.





	1. I. joyous returns

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dante's Divine Comedy;
> 
> "Through me the way is to the city dolent;  
> Through me the way is to eternal dole;  
> Through me the way among the people lost.  
> Justice incited my sublime Creator;  
> Created me divine Omnipotence,  
> The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.  
> Before me there were no created things,  
> Only eterne, and I eternal last.  
> "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"

The first time it happens, he thinks he’s gone mad.

Now, going crazy at seven might not be the most ideal of scenarios given the circumstances of his upbringing, but then again; if there’s ever anything he could give the older Marston credit for, it was for finally making someone else anything but dead.

The first time it happens, he thought of it more as a dream - a pretty daydream if you will - he hears it before he sees it.

It’s the story of the donkey, the same one she always told when it came down to story time with all the other kids, when their mothers were working and their father was either too drunk to care that one of the women weren’t actually working, or he was spending the money on games and drink faster than they could haul anything in.

The story she tells in his daydream, two days after she passed and they’d pushed her casket deep down under with a few flowers and tears and his father had sent her boys on their way, starts midway through and carries on ‘til the end, and he doesn’t realize anything wrong with the daydream until he remembers that that’s not how it goes.

He’s seven years old, not exactly bright, but he does have a knack for remembering things.

She was his mother when his own didn’t live, and he had nothing to remember her by, so when Lily told the story wrong for the first time in all the years he’d known her, he perks up and mumbles to himself and taps the side of his head, as if that can clear his jumbled mind, before realizing that this isn’t a dream.

Luke, Sara’s boy, stares up at him from where he sits on the floor, the man made of matchsticks close to crushed in chubby fingers, and he scrunches up his face in a way that tells John that he hadn’t heard a damn thing. They stare for a while, before the story begin again, this time from the beginning, and John walks out the door and catches the hem of her skirt behind the corner of the butcher’s shop.

“Miss Mac!” He calls, because who else had such a voice and way with stories and could make the children listen without a complaint?

The first time it happens, he thinks he’s gone mad. And in later years, when so many others he cares about are gone, is he even sure that he hasn’t, finally, gone off the end?

She stands there in her shift and blue skirt draped over it, hair curled all nice and that little smile on her face that was only ever reserved for the children. John always found her beautiful, especially so when there was nothing smudged on her face that made her look all pale and wrong. But now, of course, she  _does_ look all pale and wrong, because how in the Hell is she even here?

 _“Oh, darlin’ John.”_  She says, crouches to his height just because she was almost as big as Papa and he can’t reach that far, and lets a pale finger hover over his cheekbone. She doesn’t touch him, and he supposes also that she can’t, but he almost leans into her, just to feel something again.

“You told it wrong.” He says, and leans back instead, away from her, because something in her eyes isn’t right and he isn’t dumb, don’t matter what Papa says. She smiles all sad again and takes back her hand, as if she just then realizes that she  _had_ in fact told it wrong.

“Are ye a witch?” He asks and takes a step back, because he’s heard the stories of witches from her lips and if she is, well then he’s in a very wrong place. She tilts her head and shakes it, but she looks so unsure of herself when she does that, he isn’t sure either.

 _“No. I--, I don’t think so.”_  She whispers, sounding almost shy, and she looks at him with her blue eyes that always reminded him of the sky. Now, they just look like the harbor at night.

“We buried ye. And he sent Thomas and Nigel away.” He whispers back and suddenly her breath falters and she falls back on her rear, landing in the muck without a sound. There’s no splash from where she lands in the pool behind her, and there’s no mud on her skirt, and maybe that’s when he should’ve run off, but he doesn’t.

 _“Where?”_  And he starts to mumble a reply, his heart suddenly quick in his chest, before she shakes her head again and stands up, a hand over her own. _“The boys. Where did he send my boys.”_ She isn’t asking and she doesn’t have to, because John doesn’t know and so only shakes his head.

“Away.” He says eventually and he stares up at her with sudden fear and takes another step back because now she looks mighty mad and he knows what people can do once they’re mad. She doesn’t look at him, looks away instead, and he knows she’s not mad at him, but the way her eyes burn doesn’t seem to tell any difference.

“Why are you here, Miss MacIntosh?” He asks eventually, once her fire has faded, and she crouches to his level again, and seems to shrink in size; looking so much smaller than when she there before.

 _“A dinnae ken.”_  She whispers, the accent bleeding through no matter how many times Papa tried to wash it away, leaving a strange sound in the women’s throats that was neither 'American' nor Scottish. To say that John’s father was a bad teacher was like saying that the priest down the shithole street of theirs wasn’t as crooked as his spine.

John has heard the stories of those who’s come back, hauntingly pale and with the voices of doves, but never did he think he would encounter one. “Perhaps ye’re a fae!” He exclaims, suddenly, loudly, and Miss MacIntosh seems taken aback, her nose scrunched up in a funny way when she hears just  _how_ loud he was.

 _“I doubt that, little one.”_  She says, her eyes still a little angry and, if John isn’t seeing wrong, a little red. “I don’t know where he sent them, but I know the others will be verra glad to have ye back.”

She looks at him, sad eyed, and shakes her head.  _“I dinnae think it will be good for me to be seen with ye.”_  There’s a little gold her hair when the sun shines, and John remembers how they always thought her hair was the one spun of gold, rather than the maiden in the very old, very dark, stories.

She still shakes her head when he asks why, and later, when they wander back and she remains in the corners, he thinks he understands why.

There are very few of them, none other at all in fact, that has felt the cold chill that ran down John’s spine, or heard the story being told back to front and both other ways. She stays, doesn’t seem to wish to stray far, telling him little stories in the nights when he can’t sleep or when she asks him to tell stories to the others when the colic sets in on the little ones and when Luke dies from the fever that came with winter.

Papa comes down with that fever too, when he’s as drunk as he’s blind, and he can hear Miss MacIntosh laugh until the law comes and takes them away and pulls them apart; Mary, Michael and Susan goes up the street and disappears into one house or the other and doesn’t come back, be it in John’s head or before John’s eyes.

Be it that he forgets them, he doesn’t know.

Big John, Little John and Charlie goes down the street and the Misses disappears somewhere else. Not Miss Mac, however; she stays, and she sings and lulls him to sleep, puts him under a spell they would have all named wicked at this been other times, but these are the times that shouldn’t be.

 

And then he’s ten years old, Little John is eight and Charlie is not much younger, when he hops out the window and tears down the street like the bat out of Hell that he is, ignores Miss Mac’s plea of him bringing the boys along, and disappears around the corner.

 

And then he’s eleven. Eleven on the dot, trapped in an alley with a satchel full of something heavy and hopefully valuable, and a gun waving around his face; he wants to reach out, but before he can, there’s a violent shudder in the man, a chill down John’s spine and then the gun fires twice.

Once. Miss. The bullet hits the wall and digs itself snug into the mud.

Twice. It’s a hit. And John tears out of the alley as fast as he can, cold to the bone and the sound of the man trying to breathe past the blood in his throat fresh in his ears and then there’s a lawman gripping his arm.

“I wasn’t me.” He says, voice not yet strained and used, and kicks the lawman’s shins. He scurries off, all knobby knees and long fingers, satchel still in hand, and hides in the chimney sweeper’s home until the law has decided that a kid in a place where city was too loose of a term, wasn’t worth much of their time when the dead man was a woman hitter and a rich snob.

 

(He gets caught once, but there’s still some coin left from the dead man and he looks starved enough that the lawman looks the other way and lets him run off.)

He’s lucky until he isn’t.)

 

Miss MacIntosh isn’t there, still mourning the boys he couldn’t remember, when he gets himself trapped in a house where there’s suddenly too many people. He kicks, bites, and pulls the knife from his britches before it’s taken away and thrown between the floorboards where it’ll remain until someone tears them up some ten decades later.

He spits and hisses, tears the man’s shirt at the elbow and kicks mud on the woman’s skirt, and then there’s a rope around his neck and then it’s all red and panicked.

“No.” Is all he says, peeling his fingers between the rope and his neck until they pull them back and ties them too, his breath trapped in his throat and threatening to choke him before the rope does.

“If He’ll give ya another life, then maybe you’ll think twice about stealing.” The man says, growls low in his throat and gives John a somewhat wide-eyed look when he tries to see through the swollen eye John’s wild fist gave him.

John tries to snarl through the tightness of the rope, but doesn’t get further than a terrified gulp and he all but shoots a pleading look toward the wife. She stands further away, arms crossed, and doesn’t break under his plea.

The rope is tossed, and John wishes,  _begs,_ for Miss MacIntosh, but she’s nowhere in sight and nowhere in feeling, the cold chill gone from his spine.

Miss MacIntosh is gone, but there are horse hooves loud in the dry earth and then a bang and then his feet lands too hard, too stiffly, on the ground and he stumbles face first and gets a mouthful of dirt.

 _Now_ she’s there, eyes as dead as every other time and her lips are curled the wrong way up and John wheezes past chapped lips; “where the Hell were you?” but the question falls on deaf ears when two men and a boy barges past him, one reaching for him and the other man and the boy pointing guns in the faces of those that tried to kill him.

“Last time I witnessed a hanging, it was from due diligence by the law.” The man spits, clean shaven and black haired and a voice rimmed with anger. John still wheezes, clutching absentmindedly on the man’s arm until he realizes what he’s doing.

John shoots back, scrambling to his unsteady feet and prepares to run when the boy seizes him by the neck, the man with the gun nodding his head back toward their horses and shoulders him over there, tosses him up and locks his hand over John’s skinny leg. John wishes he’d fight them, but he’s more scared of the man with the rope than the man with the gun and it is still hard to breathe.

Even if the reason why has changed significantly.

“Breathe, kid. We’ll be outta here soon ‘nough.” The boy grumbles, suddenly a man, and John forces his hands to stop shaking by twisting into the gray mare’s mane. She stirs in annoyance, soothed only by the boy’s calm voice, his eyes never leaving the scene unfolding before him.

Miss MacIntosh still stares, still mourns, and John wishes, for once, that she’d go away.

He stares at her more than the scene, and is startled to life when the boy hoists himself into the saddle, seating himself behind him, and turns the mare to the road.

“What’s your name, boy?” The black-haired man with the gun asks,  _Dutch_ he later learns, and John replies as strongly as he can, just barely getting his name out without a tremble.

“John Marston, sir.” He says and doesn’t know that he leaves her staring holes into his back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title meaning; Lily, Miss MacIntosh’s first name, have a lot of meanings, but the meaning from the Lily-of-the-Valley flower is “return of happiness”; roughly putting her return as joyous (for John) until she’s gone again under less than happy circumstances (can kind of be an implement on the fact that the Lily-of-the-Valley is very poisonous!)


	2. II. oathkeeper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dutch taught him the guns, the stealing and Hosea came with the sweet talking and the charades. Miss Grimshaw taught him to cook and mend.
> 
> But Bessie taught him to feel real.

Bessie Matthews was warm.

She was kind, stern, had gentle hands and brilliant eyes, but most of all - the part that John loved best - she was warm.

It didn’t matter if it was a figure of speech, something Mr. Matthews -  _“Hosea, for the last time, dear boy”_ \- had tried very hard to teach him, or if it was that her hands were always so warm. As if she had stood close to the campfire before taking his hand, combed his hair in decisive and harsh strokes when he was too tired to argue, or had simply taught him the proper ways to hold a needle.

She was always warm. And warmth was something John didn’t realize he’d lacked until he’d joined their merry band of misfits. There were few of them, more men than there were women, and John had quickly found himself curling and hissing in a corner, as if he was one of those feral cats he had encountered more than once in the alleys. He curled and hissed like that until Hosea coaxed him out with the promise of learning something that wasn’t reading or a simple bowl of food. He remained like that until Arthur wrangled him by the neck and tossed him onto the back of the gray mare, taught him how to ride and tried to teach him how to draw.

(Arthur really was a lousy teacher, sometimes.)

Dutch taught him the guns, the stealing and Hosea came with the sweet talking and the charades. Miss Grimshaw taught him to cook and mend.

But Bessie taught him to feel real.

He hadn’t thought much about it before he came to them; always moving from one place to the next in a city not big enough and still too small and taking what he needed with the internal hope that he wasn’t going to hang for it.

 

(He almost had, but that was as close as he was going to get to it, promised Dutch around the campfire when they switched stories back and forth.)

 

He’d taught himself how to be himself, but Bessie was always behind him, one step behind him should he ever step away, and he guessed that after a while he had simply started to think of her as a constant.

She was another mother when both his own and Miss MacIntosh had passed on and none of the other Misses were there anymore. Miss Grimshaw tried to be a mother, she keeps trying, but she’s not as warm as Missus Matthews was.

So, maybe it isn’t much of a surprise that John disappears for two days once Missus Matthews stops coughing and Hosea grows so,  _so_ quiet.

It should be Hosea that gets out, runs, but that will never been how any of them do things. It’s only how John does things.

She finds him on the second day, before he decides to come back, and John’s already crying when he feels that familiar chill down his spine. It’s been a few years since Miss MacIntosh went away, but he’s seen and felt others. He knows the signs.

 _“So, this’s what you’ve been doin’.”_ She says, hands folded in front of herself. John wipes his nose on his sleeve, seventeen and stumped in growth and apparent brilliance according to Arthur, and he locks his eyes on the hem of her skirt.

“Thought you’d move on.” He says and laughs over how ridiculous it sounds and shoves his thumb nail between his teeth.  _“Thought I told ya to stop that.”_ She says and swats at him and he quickly shoves his hand behind his back, away from her hands.

He knows without knowing, that her hands are colder than the Illinois winter, and he flicks his eyes up and then down and sees an incredibly interesting blade of grass.

She sighs loud in his ear, ruffles her skirts and a few more tears leaks past John’s eyelashes. She crouches down, just out of reach and John sniffles some more, so incredibly miserable, and he begs her not to touch him.

He’s already cold.

She’d taken his hands before Hosea’d taken over and John had almost wished to drown himself in the bottles Miss Grimshaw had hidden in the woods with all their money, already knowing what an event like this would bring out. She had taken his hands and she had still be so warm, so kind and so loving.

She wasn’t warm anymore.

“Ain’t it easy?” He asks and picks the blade of grass between dirty fingers, yet again having denied Miss Grimshaw’s request of taking a bath.  _“Ain’t what easy, lad?”_ She asks and twirls a finger in her gray curls.

“Passin’ on. Or whatever it is you do.” He says and finally, finally, looks to her. Not at her. Just to her.

There’s a smile on her face, not big and not small, teeth barely shining through. Her eyes are still brilliant.

Dead. But brilliant.

_“I think it is, John. I think it is.”_

“So, why don’t you?” He always asks the question. Sometimes out loud, sometimes in his head. Most times answer they don’t answer at all and simply walk away, John’s heart not a single beat lighter and his mind not a bit clearer.

Some just frown, whispers a name or a debt or something that could be a pain to leave behind and leave it at that. John doesn’t have the courage to ask any more than that.

 _“I think you know why.”_ He nods, smiles without joy and wipes his eyes.

“He’ll be fine, Missus Matthews.”

_“Eventually.”_

It takes some time, some unfinished conversations and then some unsolved doubts, but soon enough Bessie gets him to move on back to camp; starvation having claimed a permanent place in John now only makes his reappearance look dirtier and the coat is simply a size too big even when it once belonged to Arthur.

Dutch greets him, soft smile and a gentle hand between his shoulder blades, and tries to steer a muted conversation about a homestead not too far away that could be perfect for the boys, but John can still hear the undercurrent of grief.

All the more, he can hear Hosea’s drunk, mumbling voice coming from his tent, Bessie long since gone, and it seizes his heart in another crushing grip. He nods to Dutch’s suggestions, agrees to riding out the next day with Arthur and leave the mess of Hosea Matthews to those that know him best.

He doesn’t go to Hosea, only nods once again to Dutch and travels around him. He smiles to Miss Grimshaw, tightlipped and cold, and almost brushes against Arthur once they pass each other by the horses. The other boy simply shrugs, fabric against fabric, and tips his hat in greeting; John simply looks, eyes saying enough.

He finds him grazing in the woods behind camp, his light coat standing out like a sore thumb. He approaches slowly, lifts a hand and shushes. The gelding whips his head up, blows out harshly through his nose and flicks his ears but as soon as he sees the familiar face, he leans his head forward, the old promise of sugar cubes always fresh to mind.

“Hey, boy.” He says and pets the horse’s velvety nose, the warm breath of the animal tickling the palm of his hand. The gelding lifts his lips, testing innocently if there’s anything but dirt and twigs in his pockets and hands. Finding nothing, he soon sinks his head down, eyes still flicked forward in both awareness and greeting.

John traces his fingers over the pelt, scratches where he knows he loves it the best, and smiles when the gelding’s head raises and his upper lip curls and plays.

 _“I sure will miss him.”_ She says and the cold and the wind startles the horse enough to send it skittering, but seeing nothing it soon enough comes back to investigate. Bessie simply laughs and traces the air where she could’ve touched him, perhaps imagining what once was

“I know he’ll miss you.” John mumbles and crosses his arms as he looks to the other horses, the simplicity and peace of the world distorting the picture he’s painted for himself over the last two days.

“I’ll miss you too.” He says and looks at her this time and she meets his eyes with another smile.  _“Good. I’m not just passing by.”_ John scoffs at that and shoves his hands into his pockets instead, the grief making his hands shake a little. She knows though. Oh, Bessie Matthews always knew.

 _“Can I ask you for a favor, John?”_ She asks and turns to him, only the rustle of underbrush drawing the attention of the gelding. “What?”

_“Look after him.”_

“‘Course I will, ma’am. Always.” He promises a little too easy, a streak long since adopted when he lived by the harbor and the little kids would climb him until he agreed.

There’s something else on his mind and he almost unconsciously knows what she wants to ask. She’s always been modest and John’s never liked touch, but this he can do for her.

“It’s alright.” He says and nods, something like fear too close to his voice. He’s felt enough ghosts, mirages,  _somethings,_ pass through him to know why he hates water, but if there’s one thing Missus Bessie Matthews taught him it was how to be kind.

He doesn’t offer up his arms, he’s too scared of having another fit of hitched breath and frozen limbs in the woods, and so only reaches out with his right. She looks ready to cry, so old and so alive and so dead at the same time that he almost starts crying again, and she grips his hand slowly.

She was never cold. Not even when it was winter, and they’d spent hours riding with bad gloves and frostbitten fingertips had she been cold. She is now, and it takes his breath away. Just a little, but enough to make him wonder if that fit is crawling its way up his throat.

She holds it as tight as their existences allow, shakes it up and down like they’d done when he’d been new, and he can see the few, shining tears that snakes their way down her cheeks.

Her eyes are still brilliant, her hair is still gray, and her smile is still wide.

But her hands are cold, so cold and her voice so slow, careful and full of everything, but regret and anger and John knows she was only here to see for herself.

She knew; she always did, but now she knew for sure that her leaving was just another saloon on their way to something new. She knew her husband had two choices, and that he’d eventually wrestle his way back to them.

She goes with her brilliant eyes, that promise he gave her and those cold, cold hands.

Back at camp, Hosea starts to sing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bessie/Elizabeth is hebrew for “my God is an oath”, or simply “oath”, and the title kind of fit with John promising to look after Hosea


	3. III. beloved sons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s quiet at first, distant in a way that only the wind and the isolation can create, and so John doesn’t think too much of it until he sees the shadows morph into solid shapes and his insides, somehow, freeze even further.
> 
> It's giant.
> 
> And it's angry.
> 
> And John is frozen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Animal attacks aren't very nice, so please be aware when reading this that it can get pretty violent

John almost falls into the small stream he’s camped next to when Davey Callander sneezes into the crook of his arm. He almost expects the man to have followed him up here, in search of him or lost lawmen, but Davey hadn’t been breathing right when John had left them, and his breathing is anything but labored right now.

He curses under his breath, brushes snow from his britches and watches as the water from the stream freezes on the shafts of his boots, but he soon enough looks up and sees that same old smile on Davey’s face, a smile he’d have whether he was alive or not. John soon enough looks away, because that pain in Davey’s eyes is something he recognizes all too well; he was either not expecting to die just yet, or he’d been prepared for it and almost wished for his brother to have been the same. In some cases, it could be both.

“He ain’t here, Davey.” John speaks first, a small hint of grief in his voice, and he pokes a stick in the fire to keep it alive. Davey crouches beside him and looks tempted to stick his hand inside the fire, just to see what burning feels like. John, used to the antics of both Callanders and ghosts, whips his stick across Davey’s hand, watches as it passes through and then how Davey still retracks his hand, because even ghosts can feel  _something._

The wind refuses to die, much like Callander, and John forces some salted venison down his throat, grimacing at the frozen taste and the way it makes his teeth ache to bite into it, while the dead man stands somewhat like a guard with his hands shoved into his pockets, collar popped against what he can’t feel, but eyes scanning a horizon neither can see.

Davey hears it first, since he's not the one sitting huddled by the fire in the last of Abigail's pelts and trying not to shatter his jaw with his teeth, and John thinks that he must've gone deaf in the cold, because he can't hear a damn thing until he becomes that much colder and Davey forces his frozen limbs to spasm and he rolls out of his bedroll.

“What the f--,” He tries to say, fails, and looks for the man, but Davey just stands further away with his eyes wide and jaw slack. “ _Get up, John.”_ He says and John tries to look through the wind and the snow, but all he sees are shadows that bears no names, and he goes to ask what it is Davey sees, when he finally,  _finally,_ hears it.

It’s quiet at first, distant in a way that only the wind and the isolation can create, and so John doesn’t think too much of it until he sees the shadows morph into solid shapes and his insides, somehow, freeze even further.

 

It's giant.

And it's angry.

And John is frozen.

 

Davey stands still, knowing already that him touching John won't help the still-breathing man to keep breathing without sending him into a state of shock, but a part of John knows that the wolf can't see  _him._

But it can see  _John_ just fine.

“Shit.” He mumbles to himself when his horse catches sight of the thing, tossing itself against its hitched position by the trees, and successfully breaking loose just as something howls in the distance.

But on a mountain there’re very few things that are distant; another wolf is nipping at the horse’s heels before the sound has fully settled in and John is drawing his gun when yet another wolf closes its jaws around the horse's throat, the mare squealing and kicking. She hits the wolf in the ribs with a foreleg, sends it away for a moment, but John knows there's no saving her when the only thing he sees in the snow is blood.

 _“We gotta go, Johnny.”_ Davey says and stares, just as wide eyed as John, on the form of John's dying horse, and he almost reaches out and then John is aiming; positions his revolver in his frostbitten hand and squeezes the trigger at the kicked creature. It cries out; dies, and then there's a wall of black crossing his field of vision and now he's on his back, so deep down in the snow that he can barely see anything but the glint of wet teeth.

The snow presses inside his clothes; soaks clean through what little he owns, and it presses into his ears and makes him deafer than before, the world a vacuum aside from the form pressing him deep down where no one'll ever find him.

He doesn’t think about how cold it is or how wet he is or how sick he’ll be; he only thinks of those wet teeth snapping at his throat and the hands he uses to keep the jaws at bay, and the way the wolf is clamoring for him with stretched claws and soon enough he wishes that he couldn't feel anything.

 

The thing is feral; born wild and so it shall remain, and he cries out beneath it when it sinks the first of its claws into his cheek, cuts him open down to his throat and then a little further and now his mouth is filled with blood. He cries out again of the added weight of another wolf that pounces, ready to take its share, and lands on the first, but the black wolf is not a kind one and so it snaps at its packmate and leaves John to die, before closing in again and latches its teeth around John's leg, pulling him up and down, wanting something to rip loose. When nothing gives and John is simply dragged along, it starts to tear, and it is a Goddamn fucking miracle that John doesn't pass out then and there.

John screams, then; howls at the wind as if he was one of them, and he finds his gun pressed beneath his hip and the snow, pulls it up and squeezes the trigger again. Now, it's the black wolf's turn to howl, and it does, in the moments before it dies. It runs, though, followed by those that remain, and it dies where Javier and Arthur can't see it and when the traces are long since covered in snow.

He breathes for a moment, blood pooling in his throat and coating his tongue and he knows he needs to get up, but he  _can’t._ And then Davey's there, hair frozen in the wind and the snow, and he looks about to speak and reach, but John lifts his gun arm and rolls around, just now feeling exactly how cold the wind is after the blood has frozen and made his head spin.

He doesn’t want to stay, so he doesn't, and he runs and runs until he swears he can hear them again and then he runs some more, up the cliff sides and down the slopes, desperate, bleeding fingers creating tracks in the snow, too easy to follow. He passes his dead horse at one point, the poor thing running for the sake of it, but it doesn't breathe anymore and so John just bolts past. He takes a tumble, falls face first, and now he cries.

Fear of death has always haunted him, figuratively and literally in the sense of those he knew, but he has never been as afraid as he is now. He’d been afraid of dying when Dutch had shot the rope and he’d been afraid of dying when he’d gotten himself shot down in Blackwater, but neither of those times were anything like now. This was a nightmare; it didn’t matter where he turned, there would still be no way for him to know where the Hell he was and where the Hell to go to find the others and he wishes he could make his peace with dying here, but he just can’t make himself to do it.

Ghosts, memories, mirages, _whatever_ , have a habit of reading one’s mind if you think too loud, and Davey’d always been good at listening, so John isn’t too surprised when the dead man crouches to his level in the snow, crosses his arms at the wrists across his knees and look at John with the eyes that once had made them laugh and now only made John a little bit more afraid.

 _“Ain’t nothin’ to worry ‘bout, brother.”_ He says, voice barely audible over the wind, and John raises his head from the snow to look at him, leaving blood-soaked snow and frozen tears behind, and John wishes he could scowl but the wounds hurt too much for that. “Nothin’ to worry ‘bout? You’re fucking dead.” He tries to say, but his voice is shaking, and he can’t speak much past the blood in his mouth. Davey closes his own, looks askance, and then back and shrugs.

 

The fucking bastard  _shrugs._

 

“Why’re you here, Davey?” He asks and pushes himself up, feels the bite of the wind and the salt of his tears in his face as he does, and he crawls the last bit up the slope as best he can; desperation to get away stronger than the need to die, don’t matter where in the world he is.

 _“‘Cause apparently I’m ‘fucking dead’, idiot.”_ He sneers and John chokes on a laugh caught in his throat and then there’s very little he can say, because there isn’t a Goddamn wall before him; it’s a drop, perhaps not far, but the snow and the wind made the sky white and unforgiving and made it look like there was some alright shelter from the wolves. It is an alright shelter, but it’s a Goddamn nuisance and fucking useless.

He falls with half a shriek and wails for half a moment when he tumbles and locks his leg beneath himself, and he hears how Davey has the audacity to laugh.

 

(They always was odd, them Callander boys.)

 

He stares back up at him, sees how he seems to breeze in the wind and John wants to speak, but there’s another howl and John’s heart is ready to burst in his chest when he hears it, so he closes his eyes, breathes, and when he opens them again Davey Callander is gone.

He tries to get back up, that he does, but his leg won’t let him, and he can’t reach the ledge enough to grasp at anything but loose snow, and by now he’s shaking hard enough to not feel a Goddamn thing, so he stays, listens, and tries to breathe.

He thinks he’s asleep when he hears his name, but whether it’s in dreams or not, he ain’t too sure until he pries open his eyes and stares right into a glistening pair of dead ones.

“What the fuck, Davey!” He yelps, jolts his bad leg and hisses through the pain that follows. There’s a chuckle, full of mirth, and John blinks up at the see-through thing. He’d recognize that laugh anywhere, has heard it too many times, and he chokes on himself; “Mac?” It’s barely a whisper, his voice raw and barely there and the man crouches again, further away, and looks at him with a cocked head.

 _“You don’t look too good there, Johnny.”_ He says and John thinks that’s the understatement of the new world, because he probably looks as well as he feel; neckerchief soaked through, collar popped uselessly against the wind and with ripped parts of his shirt trying to keep himself from dying on a Goddamn clifface. John doesn’t ask how the man died, doesn’t really have to, because he’s seen that look in dead people’s eyes before. He’d seen the victims of bullets, both before and after, and Mac and Davey are so similar, so the both of them dying to bullets and fruitless escapes, seems only fitting at most.

He leans his head back, finds the rough cliff and closes his eyes again, squeezes them shut and hopes that he’ll die soon enough. He listens to the Callanders bicker about something, a girl in Blackwater and another someplace further south, and John can just imagine them sitting side by side, feet dangling unafraid from the ledge and it’s enough to bring a small smile to his aching face.

John doesn’t say anything, because soon enough there’s another voice coming through the wind, however much time after the wolves caught flight and he took a tumble, and he feels as if though he could cry again; because never in his whole Goddamn life had he been happier to hear Arthur Morgan’s voice than he is right now.

He yells back at them, hollers as loud as he dares without jostling the wounds to his cheek and throat, and he gets their attention alright, because soon enough he’s on Arthur’s shoulder and almost too an exit, when those fucking wolves come back again and it’s Mac’s turn to chuckle, so much like his brother.

 _“They your friends, John?”_ Mac asks when Arthur does the same, and John has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at those Goddamn fucking things to leave him alone or kill him already. He ain’t too sure which, just yet, but he’d almost gladly have them kill him, because leaning on Javier is not going to fucking work. The man does his best to keep him going, but there must still be snow in John’s ears, because he can’t hear a Goddamn thing he says.

And then they’re all dead and John tries his best not to fall off, but it’s hard when things are turning sideways, and he can still hear the laughter of two dead boys that caught the same bullets that he had and passed while he lived. And now he somehow survived this, too.

He does cry again, later, in pain rather than fear, when Swanson and Miss Grimshaw clean him up and makes sure he doesn’t join the Callanders, and he doesn’t think he tells them of Mac, doesn’t think they know, and instead mutters about black wolves and cries again when Abigail comes to him when Jack’s gone to sleep. He cries into the folds of her coat, holds her close, and hopes that no one comes barging in and demands his attention, because he doesn’t fucking work right now.

Hosea comes more often than Dutch and Arthur, and that’s alright he thinks, because he can’t stand Dutch’s planning and scheming about going back to Blackwater and figuring out what happened to Mac, because John  _knows_ and doesn’t  _say_ and it’s safe to say he hates himself later when Arthur comes to their new place and announces it to the whole damn camp, his voice as loud as the wind had been.

Now, it’s alright because Hosea reads to him as if though he was still a sick child, and helps in the more dire and private moments, and the older man has seen John cry before and so he just wipes his tears with the warm cloth across his forehead when the need arises.

(Sometimes, John wonders why he seems to rely more on Dutch than Hosea, when moments such as these have nothing to do with plans and guns and trains.)

The whole time, from his dreadful limp from horse to bed and into that black sleep, he can see the Callanders straying their odd little family, eyeing them and most likely doing whatever they used to do, just in a different way. He thinks he sees them laughing at Bill’s terrible joke when he stands guard and the door swings open and shut and he can just barely hear them, and he thinks he sees them favoring an empty bottle at a distance since the idea of touch has gone somewhere else in the moments where death turns real.

It had always been those boys, even after they’d joined them, and so John’s not very surprised when he wakes up and they’re moving and neither of them are anywhere close.

He thinks he whispers a question ( _“where’d they go?”_ ) when he’s loaded into the back of Dutch’s wagon, but he doesn’t think he gets an answer and then he sleeps until he wakes up when the wagon is tugged about in the stream and someone yells at whoever’s driving to take it easy.

John tries not to look in the weeks after when Arthur announces Mac’s death, and instead stares at his own hands. His right hand is a little scarred after the wolf, and he thinks he sees a shake, but it’s nothing compared to the sights on his leg and face, his leg bouncing up and down by its own command, both agitation and damage he suppose and his face permanently trapped in half of a sneer. But he does look up when Arthur joins him, and a part of John knows that Arthur knows he knew, but neither speak and they both just stare.

“I know.” He says though, when Arthur’s gotten what he wanted with his long, empty gaze, and the other man just shakes his head and leaves, and John knows he could’ve spoken up about it, but the dead speak more for themselves than for him.

Fear, in those few nights he does sleep, has now taken the shape of black wolves with dead Callander eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mac is gaelic for “son” and Davey/David is hebrew for “beloved” or “uncle”


	4. IV. that gracious dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John doesn’t speak, just stares, and that’s always been enough to get the other man’s attention. “How’d we do, Johnny-boy?” He asks and steps forward and now John lets his eyes widen because now there’s no one there who can see him properly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tweaking canon just a teeny-tiny bit, but it's mainly details, so there shouldn't be too many things that are different

“You’re such a kid, John Marston.”

He winces as Abigail tilts his head back, a small, stubbed knife in her hand as she tries her best to remove the last of the stitches from his face. John would’ve laughed at her, hadn’t it been for the fact that knife was now awfully close to his eye.

“And ye’re as charming as ever, Abigail.” He shoots back and earns a stubborn smile, pressed down only be her concentrating on the last threads. “Ain’t much left now, so hold still.” She replies, nods her head at him to turn a bit more to the side and she damn near cuts him when he sees who stands further away.

Annoyed now, she places a hand against his temple and forces him to stare into the wood of the wagon he’s leaned against, but he still strains his eyes to see the figure again.

He stands not too far away, but far away enough that John at first doesn’t see anything different about him other than that his hands are empty. Sean rarely had empty hands, always playing with a blade or a bottle, jokes shooting out of his mouth faster than he could shoot a gun, but now he’s empty.

Eyes and hands alike.

John doesn’t speak, just stares, and that’s always been enough to get the other man’s attention.  _“How’d we do, Johnny-boy?”_ He asks and steps forward and now John lets his eyes widen because now there’s no one there who can see him properly.

Most people he sees appear unhurt or have injuries that no one can see. Some choose. Some, like Sean, simply doesn’t seem to know. Yet.

He wears the same hat he always wears and rarely removes; his skin is as pale as ever and his eyes… well. The eye that’s still there is as blue as always.

The other is most likely forgotten in that Goddamn town.

 _“Whatcha lookin’ at?”_ He asks, drawls, and John winces again when Abigail releases her hold on his head and looks down at her work triumphantly. “Still ugly, I expect?” He questions her, ignores Sean for a moment, and she only huffs and punches his arm and leaves. John sneaks a glance over to Jack, but the kid only looks at him, smiles and then tries to pronounce Hosea’s words back at him again.

“What happened?” He stares at his hands now, braces them against his knees and gets up. He nods once and Sean follows him with a puzzled look. Before they reach the outskirts of their camp, however, Sean tries to reach out and grab Karen’s hand and passed right on through her. John knows she’s now chilled to the bone, and she shakes like a leaf when she scurries off to join the women by their lean-to. Sean turns to call but John takes a breath and grabs for his arm and forces the dead man to follow him.

“What happened?” He asks again and watches the remaining half of Sean’s face travel a journey of a thousand emotions all at once. Eventually he stops at one, cracks a smile and cocks his head;  _“I’m expecting I was mighty drunk, my friend.”_

John’s frowning and the odd look seem to give the boy other thoughts and he soon enough lowers his arms from where he’d been gesturing. John knows before he hears Bill’s voice, but forces himself to stay. Leaving the dead to be dead ain’t always the best of options, he discovered when he left a woman in the streets of Blackwater and she tried to make him put a bullet in himself.

The Pinkertons’ shot him before he could, but his own bullet rendered him deaf for most of the flight out of town.

“What happened in Rhodes, Sean?” He asks, emphasizes the name, and Sean’s face finally settles into one of dread.  _“You know my memory, John.”_ He chuckles, but they both know that Sean has a hard time forgetting even during the times he’s been pissdrunk well into the hours of noon. For some reason, he has a better memory then than he does at any other point during his stay in the gang.

“It ain’t that bad.” He says and he watches as Sean puts a hand to his head, as if maybe then he can remember.  _“Well, I can’t remember anything right now, brother. Ask me again later, and maybe then I’ll have an answer for ya.”_

John takes a breath, turns his eyes to camp where someone is crying. “You’re dead.” He says and looks back, because now the crying has reached Sean’s ears too. _“‘s that Karen?”_ He asks instead and moves away, and the only thing John can do is follow.

 

The scene is worse than he’d imagined.

 

Micah leans against the hitching post, his weight enough to make it sway dangerously as he tucks his thumbs into his gun belt, he stares but doesn’t seem to see, but there’s no hint of remorse on his face. Bill tries, and sort of fails, to explain to Dutch what’s happened, all the while the older man is trying not to strangle Bill. Dutch is rarely angry,  _really_ angry, so seeing such a look on his face almost makes John afraid. Tilly has wrapped her arms around a grieving Karen, whose voice is now muffled in the other girl’s shawl, and Mary-Beth looks about ready to pass out.

Abigail has Jack in her arms, his face in her neck and Hosea’s pulling Sean gently off the horse with the O’Driscoll’s help. They lay him down on the ground and John breathes heavily through his nose, because it looks so much worse on someone dead than it does on someone pretending to be alive.

Sean is quiet, both the form beside John and the body by Hosea, and when John throws a glance his way, the boy is swaying dangerously. John would’ve said that he was sorry if he’d still had a voice, but the voice is gone, and John can only listen to Karen.

 _“Cad an ifreann.”_ John doesn’t understand enough Irish to know what he meant, but he knows enough to know it’s not a question.

The back of Bill’s horse is slicked with blood, blood that’s now coating both Hosea and Kieran. “Where should we bury him, Dutch?” Hosea asks, voice laced with something dangerous, and Dutch seems to contemplate for a moment, but soon enough Bill’s taken up the mission to bury him further away. They don’t put him back on the horse and instead Bill grabs most of Sean’s weight while Kieran does his best to guide them through the trees and not trip.

 _“So’s that what I look like.”_ Sean says and John wishes desperately for a way to be able to strangle a ghost.

 

John doesn’t go with them, purposely trying to wheedle information about what happened from a pissed Micah and a forgetful ghost, and when they come back Hosea is so fucking loud that John wonders if anyone of them will be able to get any sleep tonight.

(He doubts few people will sleep anyway.)

If there’s been few times he’s seen Dutch truly angry, it’s been ever fewer times where he’s seen Hosea really, fucking pissed off. He’s quieted a bit by the time Jack grows sleepy, but John knows that both Bill and Micah will be doing the shit jobs for at least a few days, because an angry Hosea’s not someone to talk back to.

John even doubts that Micah dares to talk back to the man, no matter how many times he stalks the edges and tries to get a jab in at the wrong angle.

Sean stays behind and John rides out as much as he can, just to get away from the smothering he gets from being the only one able to see him. He rides out and about in pretty much the same directions as Arthur, but he never encounters the man even once, his exploits seemingly pulling him further away from them. Figuratively rather than spiritually, if he could be one to speak about such things.

They greet in passing, one leaving and one going, plays some poker here and there with stolen chips and passes cigarettes between them when it comes to their turns at the watch. It feels a little more real, a little more like before, the only difference being John’s scars, a giant gap between them and the hauntings of an annoying Irish ghost.

 

John’s alone at the watch when Sean tries to kick a rock into the trees, passes through it harmlessly, and plops down on the ground, looking so much more like a kid than either of them ever were. At least he’s gotten better at hiding the hole in his head, John ponders when Sean flicks a strand of red hair away from his face and he can see with both eyes.

 _“How come you can see me jus’ fine and no one else, ‘ey?”_ He asks and stares at the rock as if it had offended him. John shakes his head and shrugs and takes a blow from the cigarette. “Ain’t sure. Wish I didn’t.”

 _“Ye’re real fuckin’ funny, y’know that, John Marston?”_ Sean says and looks up at him where John leans against a tree. “The court jester.” He mutters as he stares into the distance, the sound of hoofs growing louder. “Who goes there?” He calls and Sean doesn’t make a move, remaining still and quiet in the middle of the path.

“It’s me.” Comes the voice and both John and Sean open their mouths to greet them, but soon enough Arthur comes barreling through the trees on his horse, straight through Sean’s apparition. The horse neighs in discomfort, tosses its head and turns on a dime, Arthur’s eyes glaring right through Sean’s shocked face.

“Well, look who’s back.” John mocks lightly as Sean starts to sputter incoherent sentences and Arthur keeps scanning the ground for a snake or an ill begotten rodent that’s taken up attacking cantering horses.

“Figurin’ we ain’t got much time before them agents show back up.” John says and tries to sway Arthur’s attention away from the waving hands he can’t see and the confused Irish that he can’t hear and imaginary animals. “Sure. Dutch says anythin’ ‘bout leavin’, yet?” Arthur says, leaning against the horn of the saddle.

John shakes his head and grips his weapon tighter just to keep from whacking Sean in the head. He wouldn’t feel it, but he would stop raving so much.

John had learned a long time ago, back before Abigail and Jack and that whole mess he stirred up by leaving, that sometimes animals picked up on ghosts easier than humans. Which was probably why he wasn’t the most well liked of people around Copper and why Arthur’s horse was currently trying to dance away in the direction of the lake.

And, he figured, animals picked up on these kinds of things easier because humans were just plain dumb.

“Ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” He says, earns a nod, and finally gets to whack the butt of the gun against Sean’s back, the man’s mouth snapping shut. “He can’t hear ya, so stop your whining.”

_“He passed clean through me! Do you know what that feels like?”_

“I have an inkling.”

***

Sean is busy shouting directions when John and Arthur take Shady Belle, his fingers clearly itching to pick up a gun and help, and when they’re finished he’s busy shouting praise and things they could’ve done differently.

“How come you haven’t left yet?” John asks, slowing Old Boy to a walk as he hears Micah’s drawl from further up the road. Sean looks up at him and stops, crosses his arms and taps his foot.  _“Don’t know the answer to that one, Johnny-boy. Maybe there’s somethin’ I’m meant to do. Whaddaya say ‘bout that, huh? Sean MacGuire; heroic outlaw.”_

“ _Dead_ heroic outlaw, in that case.” John says and waves an arm, earning Dutch’s wave as confirmation.  _“Why you gotta be like that? Let me have one ting.”_

“How ‘bout ‘dead outlaw’, then?”

Sean just huffs on the way back to Shady Belle.

***

John’s chuckle is almost a little hysterical when they get Jack back and Sean is all but crying over the fact that he can’t have any liquor

He’d been whining in Saint Denis. He’d been whining on the cemetery, and the grown scarily quiet when he’d encountered other long dead people walking around, seen their wounds, and then whined some more.

John supposes he deserves to be at least a little bit hysterical, given that he hadn’t been when he’d first discovered he was dead, but hearing him whining about liquor on Jack’s first night back brought some unexplained, tipsy, laughs from a not-too-drunk John Marston.

But the drinking and the laughing and the smiles dies down in the days after and Sean and Arthur are the ones who comment over John skittish behavior. Something ain’t right; something keeps flickering, but he’s never been good with whatever this bullshit of a thing is, so he doesn’t know until he does, and so all he tells Arthur is that he’s just waiting for Bronte’s other shoe to drop.

It’s partially true, but it’s not the whole truth.

***

Mary Beth is the first to ask. Sean is the second.

Kieran is the third.

And then it doesn’t matter who asks what anymore.

Kieran is still shouting in confusion and fear when John grips Jack under the arms and shoves him into his mother’s hold, brandishes his own gun and prays to God or whoever that the next on his list of visitors ain’t either Jack or Abigail.

But he doubts God listens to murdering fools, and so he levels his gun at the O’Driscolls’, pulls the trigger and watches them drop; one after one after one, until he forces his legs to move, his family to get safe, and shouts for Arthur to make his retreat back into the house.

He listens, albeit a bit reluctantly, and John curses stubborn idiots once again.

Before Arthur shuts the doors, he can just faintly hear Sean shouting slurs at the cowering O’Driscolls’ and Kieran pleading for something that can’t be changed.

“Goddammit.” He curses again, breaks the windows and fires once, twice and a hundred more. They drop like flies and then they flee, wild bullets from a raging Mrs. Adler and a somewhat confused Arthur. John watches as Arthur passes clean through Kieran, who drops like a sack of potatoes and covers his head with his hands. Arthur doesn’t seem to notice the shower of ice water he just got, and instead fires from behind their little blockades, holding off those too stupid to turn tail.

And when they do, John finds himself looking at Kieran’s corpse rather than Kieran himself, whose head isn’t literally in his hands and who is breathing unnecessary, uneven breaths. John dares a glance to him and watches as Sean positions himself in front, effectively shielding Kieran from seeing what he already knows.

No one gets drunk that night, except Karen and Bill, when Hosea and Swanson come back, hand waving indicating where they put him down and that there were no more O’Driscoll boys milling about.

John leans in the back porch, away from their chatter, and watches Abigail gently rocking Jack in her arms, while Sean stands further away and tries to tell Kieran things he himself doesn’t even know about being dead. There’s gesture toward him, and then Kieran’s dark eyes are on him, mouth open in a little ‘o’, and John simply raises his hand to his hat in a salute and waves it outward; discreet to those alive, but clear as day to those gone.

Kieran seems to sulk a whole lot more than Sean and is increasingly more annoying, however that could be, and all but shits his pants twice when the ghost that Swanson saw appears and disappears on the other side of the swamp, making Sean laugh until he trips and falls into the murky waters.

(He climbs out with ease, clean as he ever was, but he still complains about almost being eaten by a gator.)

“If I promise to look after your horse, will you promise to stop with the sulking?” John asks him when it’s his turn to guard the gate, Kieran staring wistfully into the distance and Sean once again trying to kick rocks at Lenny further down the lawn. Kieran looks up at that, everything dead about him hidden apart from the occasional blood spill from his neck and eyes

“You should get that under control.” John says and waves his fingers, motioning at his face. Kieran coats his fingers in blood, wipes it on his pants, and looks back up;  _“I ain’t even sure where he is.”_ He whispers and John nods instead of answers, because the horse that he rode in on wasn’t Branwen, and God knows where the rest of the O’Driscolls’ could be now.

_“And I ain’t sulkin’.”_

“Sure, you ain’t.”

***

Sean’s there when Dutch drowns Bronte, is there when they plan the robbery and he’s there when Dutch looks at him and turns away and flees up to the roof.

John doesn’t think he’s ever seen Sean as mad as he is then; Hosea’s gone, not here,  _Dutch_ is gone and not here and John is being manhandled to the ground, arms behind his back in a grip that could close enough to call breaking, and he’s there when John’s shoved into an office.

Kieran’s there too. For the last part at least.

John spits and curses, twists and yells, but nothing he says is of any use. He sees them both reach, shakes his head once; violent enough to cause cramps in his neck, and he thinks he sees something else at the edges of his vision.

(He begs it not to come now. Not here. Not today.

He begs it to let him stay in blissful, painful, oblivion when they drive him to prison after prison and threaten to shoot his foot off or cut out his tongue if he doesn’t speak, and he begs it to stay far away.

It does, for a while.

But then it’s Sisika. And Sisika’s no fun at all.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sean, the Irish form of John, is hebrew for “gracious” and Kieran, the Irish form of Ciarán and a diminutive of Ciar, is Irish for “black”
> 
> My translation of names and especially the use of the Irish language may be wrong, so please correct me!
> 
> "Cad an ifreann" - what the hell
> 
> I thiiiiink you guys might already know what the next chapter's going to be ;)


	5. V. brave salvations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d been given a promise at twelve by a man that spoke like the world was his and their lives were infinite. 
> 
> He’d been given a promise that, yes maybe he could die from a bullet or a blade or a fall, but never; never, would he be hanged. Never again would there be a noose wrapped around his neck and never again would he have to have his heart squeezed bloodless in his throat.

He’s chained to the wall of a would-be prison cell, bars on two sides and the rest plain, cracked stone. Some sunlight filters through and brings with it the smell of shit and sticky warmth, his mangled dress shirt sticking to his body by sweat and blood. He breathes slowly, in through his nose and out through his mouth, and does his best to keep from letting the keening sounds he wants to make, turn into a jumbled mess in his mouth.

The agents were brutal, but effective. Or, as effective as one could call them, considering that John hadn’t said a damn word to them since they’d caught him in Saint Denis. His head leans heavily against the wall behind him, the chains rattle beneath his forever-starved frame, and he thinks of everything and nothing.

Everything being Abigail and Jack and Arthur and Hosea and Dutch and everyone else in their little ragtag family. Everything being everyone being safe and sound and as happy as could be.

Nothing being that both Kieran and Sean stopped talking to him a few days ago. That, or John has gone deaf from his own screaming. He can still see them, still feel the chill down his back whenever they wander too close but he’s too tired to give a damn about Irish bred ghosts at the moment.

He’s still leaned like that, thinking, when the outer door swings open, slams against a wall and forces him to open his eyes to meet the ugly face of Agent Milton.

“You ain’t done yet?” He rasps past the lump in his throat and tosses his head as much as he dares, hair leaving his eyes as he does. “Oh, I don’t think we’ll ever be done, Mr. Marston.” Agent Moron states and waves for the other feller to open the door.

Before he knows it, rough hands grip his arms and neck, forces a shinier and much more bloodless pair of chains around his wrists, and then there’s just one more ride before he knows for sure that he’s going to die.

***

He’d been given a promise at twelve by a man that spoke like the world was his and their lives were infinite.

He’d been given a promise that, yes maybe he could die from a bullet or a blade or a fall, but never;  _never,_ would he be hanged. Never again would there be a noose wrapped around his neck and never again would he have to have his heart squeezed bloodless in his throat.

And now here he is, staring up at the next man awaiting to be hanged with John’s own fear trapped in his dark eyes. John stands there, mouth dry and breath trying so desperately to be still, be calm.

He knows he fails, but he knows that others do too, because in here they’re all alike. Well, mostly at least. Some have murdered their wives and their daughters, someone’s taken a liking to another man’s wife and murdered him for it, someone got it in themselves that animals were fine brides and on and on the list went until you landed on the people such as John Marston.

Robbers. Murderers. But only he had the thing that made him the worst of the lot; he was a Van der Linde boy. And the Van der Lindes had killed an awful lot of people, prisoners mused in the exercise yard and out in the fields.

(The guards thought it too, but they simply took out their pleasure in kicks and whips and the occasional freshly used gun muzzle against the bare, raw skin on his ankles, neck and wrists.)

And here he stands; twenty-six, nameless in all but what his father and Miss Mac came up with on the spot and scarred in all the ways his new fathers named him and stares once again at a noose that crawls ever closer.

But there’s one thing he’s never been more sure of and it doesn’t matter how many times John counts the scars on his face and hands or traces the ways the claws tore his leg a bit too much to the right; he wouldn’t have chosen any other life, had he been given the choice again.

He does regret it a bit though, when he hears Sean’s hollering, Kieran’s gurgling shame where he still tries to breathe through a severed windpipe and sees Hosea step through the fields and call him a fool. John, fueled by an anger he hasn’t felt since the Pinkertons’ dragged him away and threatened Abigail’s life, whacks the pickaxe a little too hard against the ground and shoots a rock in the direction of his neighbor. The neighbor’s only reply is to drive his own pickaxe a little too close to John’s foot.

It had already been crowded in the little room that was supposed to be called a cell when there had been three living and two dead, even though only one of them could see them, but now it was downright suffocating.

John, having drawn the short straw both in build and the act of drawing actual straws, had been given the bed closest to the door and furthest away from the light. He was also the closest to Joe Beatty’s feet, but he chose not the think too much about it until Sean comes along and points it out once every hour when they aren’t outside. It was awful then; it’s worse now.

He had, in a way, grown used to the chatter of Sean and the bleeding fear of Kieran, even if the boy had started to loosen his tongue a little more to try and encourage John in some useless way or another, but now he wasn’t quite sure what to do. Before, he could’ve run off somewhere to be alone with his thoughts and try to filter whatever came out of dead people’s mouths, but in prison,  _alone_ is the one thing that you never is.

John was as lucky as he could be when Beatty was the one out in the fields and Lorimer was half deaf already and further down their odd assortment of bunks, so talking and trying to sort out his own mind wasn’t too difficult at least twice a week until Hosea, and to John’s great grief, Lenny decided to start a book club from memory to the only two illiterate people in the whole gang.

John had heard the stories before, numerous times, and he knew the way Hosea moved his hands when he spoke and the way he changed the pitch when jumping between the characters, but that didn’t stop him from smiling and hiding his laugh in the crook of his arm. He chimes in when he can, remembering the way Jack read some of the paragraphs with the imagination only a child could have.

 _“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”_ Hosea quotes at one point and John buries his face in his threadbare lump of a pillow to keep the grimarse out of sight.

***

“Keep up, Marston!” The guard calls, twisting dangerously so that the muzzle of the gun is pointed to John’s already tender side. “Alright, alright. Ain’t exactly easy with these chains on.” He mutters and regrets it instantly and grips the pickaxe in his hands hard enough to whiten the skin, and he waits a bit for the blow to come. Except it never does.

Instead, he watches as the guard goes white as a sheet, fumbles with the gun and has the damn thing under his own chin before another guard rips it away from him and asks him about what the Hell he was doing. John and the others just stare, and John catches a glimpse of bright, red hair just beyond the rookery of a barn further aways and for a bit, John thinks that Sean has finally gone off the end, as some tend to do after sticking around for too long, but the man in question catches his eye and looks just as shocked.

John has had few times where he’s liked Miss Molly O’Shea, but apparently he liked her well enough for her to allow him one tiny bit of saving grace before a balloon flies across the skies and leaves them all on lockdown for a day and then some, John trapped with Beatty’s feet and Sean’s stories.

***

He won’t ever admit it, but he was damn near crying when he heard Arthur’s voice come from outside the walls. Not just because he was nearing his final day, but because it was Arthur.

Leaned against Sadie’s back, hands tightly gripping the end of her saddle and her gun poking into his midriff he can still hear Kieran’s odd, wet whooping, Sean’s and Lenny’s laughs and that smile that was all Hosea and all John needed to keep from running for them and get them all shot on the spot.

He’d missed them. But he weren’t gonna tell anyone that.

He acts surprised when Arthur and Sadie tells him about Lenny and Molly and tries to understand why Molly would save him further pain, if she was the one that sold them out and got him put there in the first place, and then Arthur talks about Dutch and his reluctance to getting John back, and the voices in his head grows eerily quiet. He doesn’t quite believe them until he gets there, slides off of Bob and Abigail takes him in her arms, tears of joy and frustration fighting equally.

And then Dutch comes, and he believes every word they said.

There’s a different pitch in Hosea’s voice then, solemn and grief stricken, and John doesn’t think he’s heard such a horrible sound come from his father since Missus Bessie passed and he went mute for a month.

John thinks, for the split moment where Hosea reaches and Dutch barges past with fury and thunder in eyes and limbs and the dead man sputters about morality and mortality, Micah too close behind, that the biggest mistake they all ever did was love him.

Dutch is loud and confused, one of the two which he has been so many times before, and Hosea reaches again but doing so would lead to nothing for either of them, so John moves a hand, the arm across Abigail where she’s more than ready to sneer, and hold them both off while Arthur breaks through and Hosea’s gone, barely smoke on the breezed air where anger hangs like the noose meant for John.

He’s not gone long, of course, now he couldn’t ever stray far; he always came back, but Lenny’s well and truly gone it seems and for the moment it’s not something John thinks too much about; because Micah’s too close to any of them and Abigail drags John away before he can launch himself at him and join Hosea in staring at what once was.

There’s poison in Hosea’s dead eyes and John doesn’t blame him; he just waits and looks as he strips himself off the striped rags, washes himself as best his sore limbs allow and pull on other rags tucked neatly in the still-packed bags, and when he’s done Hosea looks to him again and John wishes his heart would stop dropping to the core of the Earth every time he looked at him like that.

Abigail’s gone and would return moments later with some of Pearson’s stew, but for now he’s alone with the last ghost of their botched farewell tour, and he bites his tongue to keep from speaking.

 _“Why am I still here, John?”_ Hosea asks, sounding so unimaginably tired, and John just looks at him, curls his lips into a sneer and shakes his head while his fingers do their best to tie the straps of his pants into a sufficient knot. “I don’t know. I don’t know why either of ye’re still here.” He says, avoids the name, and looks up in time again to catch his eyes and see Abigail tuck the tent flap away and hold the bowl steaming in her hands, Jack tucked between her legs.

“Hey, Jack.” He says and does his best to crouch when Jack untangles himself from Abigail’s skirt and throws his arms around his too-small father. John rocks him gently, holds him steady and now he damn near cries when he tucks his face into his son’s hair and breathes him in, Abigail and Hosea looking at them with equal forces of softness.

The tent flap opens in the breeze and then Hosea’s gone and John keeps rocking Jack in his arms before he also reaches for Abigail, because John can’t bear to listen to the way Micah’s voice floats through the air as foul as Karen’s alcohol laden breath and how Dutch nods and hums, and John _knows_ that Hosea’s standing too close, trying his best to get the living to listen to the dead. It’s never worked, but John doesn’t blame him for trying.

He’s not quite sure how he knows, just that he does, and what he knows now is that Lenny’s gone somewhere else, perhaps to join his daddy, and that Sean seems close enough to leave too.

Kieran, though, just stands and looks at them all, inches away from the horses and miles away from the living, the same as it’d always been, and John’s never been more confused by someone who’d died in such a terrible way. They either leave real fast, or they stick around for too long. John was afraid over what the latter would do to him, should he choose to stay behind.

He hears the sound of hooves on stone and knows almost subconsciously that it’s Arthur riding out again, readying himself to save some other poor bastard or maybe save himself, whichever comes first, and then comes the soft sounds of voices and Charles makes his presence known outside the tent, waiting patiently for permission to enter.

John still has Jack in his lap when Charles enters, followed by Sadie leaning heavily against the tent post, and John tries his best to eat whatever kind of stew it is in a less than dangerous balancing act now that the bowl is cold. But his hands are shaking, and Abigail soon takes the bowl from him and helps him as much as he’ll allow, but he’s hungry so he doesn’t too complain.

He looks at Charles, living eyes in a frozen face, frozen in the act of concealment and sees Hosea flickering around Dutch’s tent, looking all but ready to choke the life out of Micah. John would more than happily join him, but doing so would put him in the same position that Hosea now occupies, and John doesn’t wish to die just yet.

(Although, he doubts anyone wishes to be dead in moments such as these.)

***

John has been shot before. He’s fallen before. He’s had ghosts screaming in his head before. He’s had Arthur look at him like that before.

But never, never, has he felt what he feels when The Count’s tail swishes out of sight and John digs himself out of the mud and twigs, rocks having jabbed him with their sharp edges. Never has he heard words such as those leave two of the gentlest people he’s ever known’s mouths, and never has he had such an urge to scream.

***

John hadn’t ever read the Bible save for a few passages, and even then it was only to be able to steal something out of a church, something he got Hell for later, but the pieces that he’d read had told him of horses.

(Which might’ve been the only reason why he kept reading it, because horses are that much more interesting than any prophet out there.)

And now, no more than maybe ten years later, he almost expects; no, he  _is_ expecting, a pale horse to ride into camp, death on its back and eyes redder than blood, but all he sees is Micah’s lurking and Dutch’s descent.

There is a pale horse walking around camp and there is a black one, but if the ones to end their world was to have horses, then it was seriously lacking.

Until matters gets worse and there’s a bullet in John’s shoulder, everyone that still matters are gone, and Pinkertons’ ride in on horses in every Goddamn color there is.

Dutch ain’t Death. But he sure as shit ain’t the way of life no more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hosea, a form of the hebrew Hoshea, means “salvation” and Leonard means “brave lion” in several Germanic languages 
> 
> I tried to include Molly, but it didn't really fit since we don't see her interact very much with John, but I did give her a little mention!
> 
> Hosea quotes Moby-Dick by Herman Melville - “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”


	6. VI. king of the sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s redemption in its truest form, he feels after having listened to all of those philosophy books Dutch used to read and Hosea used to quote, and he knows it ain’t his to change. John’s head is messed up, sure, but he’s not magic; he can’t magically make someone better.
> 
> He can only make them a little less alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter deals a little bit with depression and suicide attempts! Beware as you read this!

"Humans are curious by nature, Mr. Matthews." The doctor had said, shoved a pipe between his lips and lit it in a flurry of movements and had left John to stare, take a breath, nod and turn to leave. “Had to be sure, ‘s all.” He’d replied and had a hand on the handle when the doctor had spoken up again, voice muffled by the pipe.

“This feller; he close with you?”

John had turned, caught Hosea’s eyes and nodded; “He’s my brother.”

The secretary had showed him out and John’d tried to keep the doctor’s eyes from finding his face, knowing damn well that he wouldn’t be able to keep it straight until he got back on Old Boy.

He’d known. He’d known for a while, he supposed, but it was still a little like getting a bullet to the chest when he’d listed all the signs, heard the doctor sigh and then watched as Hosea fell back against the wall and how Kieran looked ready to start throwing things.

(He’d never expected Kieran Duffy to have such a reaction, but then again, he supposed Arthur had that effect on some people.)

John had always been a little cold when he’d been too close to some people who happened to be dead, but there were those cases where the ones close to death were colder than those who were actually gone and being near Arthur was almost like being back up by Colter again.

And now, later, with Kieran finally gone after that debacle with Sadie and Arthur and a whole heap of O’Driscolls’ at a ranch out by Strawberry and Hosea shouting warnings that came a little too late, John was frozen solid. The cold he felt now was almost worse than the cold of the mountain and all those times ghosts had forced his limbs to other commands, and it was all because this time it was Arthur’s hand on his shoulder, his hat on his head and those bright eyes dulling every moment he spent close by.

“We ain’t both gonna make it.”

And it had hit John like a Goddamn train. John knew. Of  _course,_ he fucking knew, but that didn’t mean he had to accept it. But it still don’t matter how many times people have called him an idiot and a fool; John Marston was brighter than people gave him credit for, and he already knew the words that would come out of Arthur’s mouth before Arthur knew it himself. He knew the outcome to this story.

He just didn’t want to believe it.

Hosea peers over the edge of the mountain, sees something or other, and shouts back at them that they need to move. But John  _can’t,_ because  _Arthur can’t_ and it’s not until Arthur waves him off that he starts to understand what it is Arthur’s actually doing.

It’s redemption in its truest form, he feels after having listened to all of those philosophy books Dutch used to read and Hosea used to quote, and he knows it ain’t his to change. John’s head is messed up, sure, but he’s not magic; he can’t magically make someone better.

He can only make them a little less alone.

“You’re my brother.” He says and Arthur replies in the only way they both understand; “I know,” and  _that’s_ when John pulls his frozen feet down the pass, Hosea begging him to go back in his ears and his eyes burning with unshed tears.

It’s pain, fear, grief and, he supposes, love. But he doesn’t go back.

He steals a dead man’s horse, ignores the stiffness of his limbs and turns deaf to Hosea. The man might’ve simply gone quiet, but either way, the ride back is quieter than a grave.

He falls off the horse on the outskirts of Copperhead Landing and Tilly and Sadie does their best to pull him up and inside, Abigail’s eyes filled with tears and with Jack breathing strangely in the corner. John has little time to comprehend much of it, since he’s soon enough stripped of his coat and shirt, hat tossed on the floor and trained fingers and whatever equipment there is to be found in their bags digging into the wound in his shoulder.

He doesn’t know more than that Tilly forces whiskey down his throat and forces him to bite down on his own belt, and then it’s over and it’s all just blissful sleep and dulled dreams until he’s startled awake by the cryings of deer and the whispered voices of Abigail and Sadie.

He thinks he hears Hosea, soft and light, read Huckleberry Finn in dim lights and he suddenly feels so much more like a kid than he’s done in a long while. He blinks once and then twice, sees the man’s grim features and soft edges and lets himself drift off again when Huck goes home with Widow Douglas.

Hosea’s gone when he wakes up again and it’s suddenly stifling hot in the little building they call camp, and it finally feels like he can breathe right again. He’s quiet when he tells them about Arthur and Dutch and Micah and Miss Grimshaw and then it’s like he’s being strangled again because Miss Grimshaw peers in through moth eaten drapes with eyes blue as the sky and darker than tar in the moments it takes him to breathe in and out.

He’d expected her to be like Arthur; to move on and don’t look back, but Miss Grimshaw’s always been the stubborn kind and he wants to speak to her, but he _can’t._

So, he simply tells them, and he and Sadie makes a promise to one another that Micah Bell, one day, will die.

It would’ve been so much easier if it had ended there with their promise and their hate over what was no more, but nothing’s ever simple. Tilly leaves first, takes her horse and goes with hugs and smiles and promises they know they can’t all keep, and Sadie leaves second, after she’s found them a second horse grazing off the path and that, right there, is a promise John intends to keep.

They leave third, a few days after when John’s fever has officially broken and Jack has learned to speak right again, and John nurses the last bottle of whiskey in remembrance of what once was, when he feels the stiff cold creep back and he tears his stitches when he throws the half empty bottle through Arthur’s bulking frame.

He doesn’t care if anyone hears him. For once in his life he doesn’t care.

“What the Hell are you doing here?” He snaps, voice rough and unused and drunk, and Arthur looks as confused as he feels.  _“Ain’t you the one gonna tell me that?”_ The man, the  _dead_ man, asks and John can only feel how the blood trickles away from the stitches and down his shirt, but he simply doesn’t give a shit right now.

“You ain’t supposed to be here.”

 _“Then where the_ Hell am I  _supposed to be, Marston?”_ John doesn’t have an answer for that and simply stares, his eyes hopefully telling Arthur enough. By the end, he’s shaking his head violently and twists his dirty locks on his hands, because it seems that these days crying is something that’s comes a little too easy. “I was expecting you to have that answer before me.” He says eventually, swallows his tears and presses a hand to his shoulder where the liquor dulled something but not everything.

 _“Let me get Abigail for ya.”_ Arthur starts, moves up the stairs and it takes John everything he has not to turn around and grab at him. He looks so real John could just dream that it  _was_ real, but he’s still as pale as the moon John left him under and his eyes have finally died down to that small spark of ember only dead men carried. “You can’t, Arthur.” He says and steps away, prodding the wound as he stares into Arthur’s eyes.

Miss Grimshaw’s gone; stayed but for a moment, maybe to check up on them all, but John had so desperately hoped that whatever had gone down there on that mountain had been enough to get the ever determined and stubborn Arthur Morgan to lay down arms and rest for once in his Goddamn life.

 _“And why not?”_ He asks and John starts to seriously wonder whether or not Arthur actually is as stupid as they always said he was. “‘Why not?’ _”_ He echoes, shakes his head and almost laughs over the hysterics of it all. “  _‘_ Why not?  _’_ ”

“ _Have you gotten stuck or somethin’?”_ Arthur asks and now John does laugh. “I ain’t gotten stuck.” He bites back and sinks into his chair, the chuckle still light on his tongue. “I thought you was smart. Even Sean understood faster’n you.”

Arthur turns fully to him now, head cocked to the side and his confusion has always made him look young; just never  _this_ young.  _“Sean?”_

“Sean, Kieran, Lenny.” He pauses and stares at the blood that’s seeping through his shirt. “Hosea.” He mumbles without looking up, but he sees Arthur’s legs shift, taking up a stance that was always part of his guarded self.  _“Watchu talkin’ ‘bout._ ”

It’s not a question. John isn’t sure what it is, but it isn’t a question.

“Sometimes, they see things they wanna see. I guess. Kinda like an alternate ending to how it really went down.” He starts and picks at the brim of Arthur’s hat, perched proudly on his head. “Sean kept mumblin’ about coming back to Karen; God knows how many times I had to keep him from touchin’ her. Think Kieran dreamt of ridin’ that horse of his again, only it weren’t ever possible. Lenny ‘n Hosea just seemed to wanna read.”

He takes a breath and looks back up at Arthur, the cold still there and the grief at the back, knowing that if he let it out, he’d never be rid of it. But grief had always been a part of his life, and John figured it was there to stay.

“You can’t get Abigail for me, because you ain’t even here. Not to them, at least.” He says and waves a hand. Arthur, who had first seemed so sure of what had happened when he stepped up the path, now looks more scared than confused and it is a sight John never thought he’d see. “What happened up there? With the Pinkertons’’?”

He sees the stubbornness and confusion melt away and leave Arthur with a crease between the eyebrows, leaves him looking so unlike himself that John wonders if it went a little like with Sean. The man couldn’t remember, much like Lenny couldn’t, no matter how hard either of them tried, but John thought it had more to do with the hole in his head rather than his drunken nature.

Maybe there is a hole somewhere in Arthur’s head and that he was now more stupid than either of them came to call him in the past, but if there is, well, John can’t see it.

 _“Micah.”_ He says and John leans against the back of the chair, legs bent and blood clotting the fabric of his shirt. “Is Micah why ye’re here?” He asks and looks back up, his new horse grazing the ground with flicking ears.

 _“Sure._ _Or, I think so at least.”_ He sounds doubtful, but John can’t blame him. It couldn’t be easy being dead and close to the one person you’d died to save. John closes his eyes when Arthur continues;  _“I think Dutch came. At some point. Can’t remember why though.”_

“It’ll come back. Or, it won’t.”

 _“How come you can see me?”_ He asks after having been quiet for a while and John purses his lips and shakes his head. “Dunno. Always been like this.” He replies and Arthur moves to lean on a post, arms crossed over his chest and his hatless head nodding as he spoke.

_“So’s this why you’ve been all kinds of weird the last few years?”_

“If you mean me almost shootin’ myself more times than most others; yeah. But that ain’t just because of me.” John snorts, remembering Blackwater and that whole affair in Ashton when a certain spitting mad ghost and finally gone of the end and tried to kill the whole bank they were planning on robbing. It hadn’t gone too well for either of them, if John remembered right.

_“That ain’t what I meant, but yes.”_

“We’ve lost a lotta people, Arthur. And I’ve seen most of ‘em go. Some never showed up. I’d hoped you’d be one a them.” He says and opens his eyes to look back up at him. The strange paleness is gone, there are no bruises around the eyes and he’s not as lean anymore; he looks more and more like he did back at Blackwater than he ever did after Colter.

 _“And what happens if I stay?”_ He asks and John throws up his hands, hisses when he jolts the opened wound, and leans forward over his knees. “Depends on you, I guess.”

Arthur goes quiet at that, and John knows he’d take the first ride outta there if he could. The only problem being that none of them knew how to actually move on.

***

John spends what little earnings he has left from the old job in the town’s saloon, gets himself shitfaced and spends the night in jail. He sees Arthur read the bounties and peer over the sheriff’s shoulder and he knows Arthur would laugh at John’s luck, hadn’t it been for the gun he’d loaded up and started spinning.

Arthur; brave, old Arthur, had been too scared of making the gun go off if he’d grabbed at him, so he’d simply tried telling John the important things.

Abigail. Jack. John himself. Whatever came after this point in this miserable heap of a town that was enough to keep going for. But John had only chuckled, waved the gun some more and then spun the chamber again, his little game getting dangerously close to not being a game anymore and he’d looked at Arthur with a look Arthur might not’ve seen before;

He wasn’t scared. Not of dying at least. But he was pretty Goddamn terrified of not knowing what came after.

And then the sheriff showed up, wrestled the gun away and threw John into a jail cell to sleep it off, the gun locked tightly in his desk. And then Abigail showed up, and there sure as shit weren’t any stronger power than a woman scorned, and the sheriff unlocked the door before she could ask twice, wrung John by the ear and confiscated his gun for the remainder of their stay.

“What the  _Hell_ were you doing?” She snaps, voice rough and sharp and so Goddamn beautiful that John’s hungover mind could only wince and reach. “Spendin’ the last of our money like that when we were just leavin’.” She fumes, leaves out the part with the gun and refuses him any further access to it in the days after.

John doesn’t have an answer that’s good enough for her, so he just stays quiet and ashamed and lowers his head under Arthur glare. 

***

 _“We ain't those kinda folk, no more, John.”_ Arthur says, later when John’s sleepily discussing the past and the present with Uncle’s and Charles’ turned to him in sleep, thumbs hooked in his gun belt, stripped of all and everything; that last gun returned to John by Charles and the knife resting beside what's now only dust in a mountainside grave, splinters of wood forever etched in rusting steel. John looks at him, really looks at him, and sees just how dead Arthur's eyes are, and it will always be the one constant that tells him that this is real; that there was life there once and something so like it swims there still, however small, but there's only death now that stares back at him, don’t matter how much of Arthur still remains.

“You ain't no kind of folk.” he says, and Arthur hums, inclines his head to the ground and nods, because he accepted this far earlier than John did, and he’s always been good at that.

 _Had_ always been good at that.

(The man accepted; he was just too stupid to understand sometimes.)

“Don’t stay too long.” he says, almost whispers, and Arthur looks back up. It’s been years since the mountains and the wolves and the shitshow that came after, but he keeps saying it; “Most can't do it. Outta those I've seen, anyhow.” he says, corrects, and thinks of Miss MacIntosh and her velvet dress, coated red and brown by the end and with so much distress in her dead eyes before she up and vanished before the noose could claim John’s life. ‘ _Took her long enough’_ , he’d thought once she was well and truly gone, when her dead eyes no longer stared holes in the back of his head when he weren’t looking and he reminded her too much of her poor, dead sons.

He thinks of Annabelle (‘ _oh darlin’ Annabelle_ ’ he hears Dutch say in that mournful way he’d used to say things until nothing much seemed to matter anymore), and how she looked before Dutch took the next one to his bed and left the O'Driscolls buried in their own shit while Colm still roamed free. She didn’t stay long, but she stayed long enough for John to see the fire burning in those dark eyes, once alive and then dead, when she wished for something to wrap her hands around. She’d left, eventually, when John had almost started another shootout in their latest prey of a town when she was anything but calm and quiet, but only because he begged her, and Dutch had gotten shot for her troubles.

 _“What happens?”_ Arthur asks, silent and cold in all but voice, and John sighs and bites his cheek, because sometimes it's better not to know. “You go mad. Sometimes, at least.”

 _“Who didn't?”_ He asks but John knows that they both already knows the answer. “Sean. Kieran.” He starts, and Arthur nods, because those names aren't really surprises; especially not Kieran.

“Lenny left once you got me outta Sisika, don't know why, but no one's ever got a reason to stay most times.” He pauses there and flips the revolver,  _Arthur's_ black revolver, between scarred fingers and suddenly there's a blur in his eyes and he can't see Arthur no more.

 _“Hosea?”_ Arthur asks, still quiet, and John points the gun downward and looks back up again. He looks past Arthur, sees what he can't, and shakes his head. It's slow and sad, and Arthur draws an unnecessary breath of distress, because it didn’t quite sound like Hosea.

“He saw Dutch. Went spittin’ mad the first time. He ain't used to not bein’ listened too, so seein’ Dutch like that seemed to make whatever this is go over his head.” John waves a hand over Arthur, who takes a step back and turns to look around, as if maybe Hosea's still around somewhere, even after all these years.

“He stayed. A while. Ain't here no more, though.” He doesn't say that Hosea begged John to go back for Arthur, even when they both knew it'd never go their way, and he doesn't tell Arthur of Hosea's vigil by his bedside the days before Arthur himself turned up between those trees and made him hurl a whiskey bottle and cut himself good and proper. He doesn't tell him how Hosea gripped his hand, kissed his brow, and said goodnight; the same way he'd always done whence they were small and sickly, and then gone to whatever came After.

(John tried not to dwell on such things, it never goes well, but he can only imagine Hosea and Missus Bessie reading stories by a campfire under a moonlit sky and waiting, just  _waiting_ , for their little ragtag family to come barreling through the trees like all those moments passed, procuring this and that from their pockets like some odd trio of magicians.

He tries not to dwell, but he does try to think about it.)

John doesn't say and so Arthur doesn't ask, and it's better like that John thinks and sighs, draws a hand across his face and wipes the dirt away.

“Ask.” He says, eventually, when the act of staring at the gun's engravings have become dull and Arthur's silent contemplation becomes too much for John's tired ears.

 _“Did you know?”_ Ain't much of a question, but John lowers the gun again and stares him right in the eyes, stares past the dark death looming there. “Yeah.” Is all he says, and Arthur takes a breath and shifts his feet.

_“How?”_

“Went to a doctor.”

 _“You? Went to a doctor? Did he tell you to start cleanin’ yerself up a bit, too?”_ Arthur tries it as a joke, but his recent trip from Montana and down to West Elizabeth once again with the rest of them hasn't lightened his mind of what's happened in the days he was gone at all and he remains a sullen, stubborn bastard even after whatever went down on that mountain.

  
(Gone _, gone, gone, gone, gone.)_

  
“Went askin’ once you'd gotten me out and Abigail would let outta bed.” He says and stands up and holsters the gun, because suddenly he’s more than tired and he just wishes to go home. But where is home, exactly?

 _“Ain’t ‘round here. Yet, at least.”_ Arthur says, unhelpfully, because they are in the middle of the Goddamn plains and the house’s groundwork isn’t finished yet and John can  _see_ that, so he just scowls and pushes past, just barely avoiding Arthur’s crossed arms as he does.

“Reckon I’ll see ya later, brother.” He stops and says, but he doesn’t turn, and he knows that Arthur’s not there anymore, because there is no chill down his back and his heart has gone back to a slow, dull beat that tells him that it is just fighting to keep him alive for now. Adrenaline has no place here, and he at least still has a heart.

***

Arthur stops dead in his tracks when Charles takes a bullet and Sadie hollers for them to take cover and John makes the mistake of veering too late. He gasps for breath when he pushes through Arthur and almost trips over his feet, repeater gripped tightly in his hands and the cold seeping into his bones.

“We gotta move.” He hollers back, aims the repeater and fires once he gets close enough and watches as the man falls headfirst off the side. Arthur stands like a frozen statue in the middle, eyes still glaring at where the man had been and John grumbles as he moves past him, because that has always been the way to get Arthur to move. Charles only urges them to move, and they push up the side as best they can in the high snow.

Sadie’s confusion over the droppings of dead men is the reason why she takes the knife to the torso earlier than she would’ve, but it’s also the reason why the man dies earlier. Arthur is a heavy breeze around them, a presence that could best be described as a shield, even if the shield can’t take the wounds for you, and John edges himself on.

He shouts for Micah, kills even more of his deranged men, and finds a cabin where only a rat could live. But just when Sadie struggles to keep Micah’s gun away Arthur mumbles about someone else being close by and John can just hear how the wind dies down when Dutch opens the door and steps outside.

Arthur had, eventually, remembered what had happened on the mountain. He’d remembered the way Dutch had looked at him, dying as he was, and he remembered listening to Micah’s talk that seemed to mean nothing. But it must’ve meant something, now that Dutch points yet another gun at his youngest son and Hosea’s not there to yell at Dutch from beyond the grave that what he’s doing is crazy.

They shoot him; that last act of the ties that bound them together for fifteen years working its final magic, and John looks to Dutch in a sense of desperation, to try and see what he so hopelessly knows isn’t there anymore. They were family, once, but what he sees in Dutch’s eyes is so much brighter now than it was when he slid off Bob’s back and faced the fury he’d only heard about.

Dutch doesn’t speak, only stares, and he does seem to linger a bit in the space where Arthur stands, as quiet as the wind, and then he simply walks. He walks, and John ain’t too sure that he’ll see the man again.

(He does, but it has little to do with the money he uses to pay off the loan, buy the cattle and marry Abigail good and proper.

It has everything to do, however, with the final act of someone who never quite learned what an honest life was until he wants it too much to cover up the past.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arthur is a combination of several celtic words such as “bear”, “man” and “king” (basically King of Bears, if you will ;)) while Morgan is a version of the Welsh Morcant, “mor” meaning “sea” and “cant” meaning “circle”


	7. VII. blessed traveler

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you’ll allow it.” He says and Arthur nods back. “That little girl better be nothin’ but good, Marston, or I’ll haunt ya ‘til the day you die.” John simply scoffs, puts the drawing carefully back in the book and closes it, leaves it on the nightstand and leaves to find Abigail on the porch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: child death

She’s born in May.

She’s a small thing, smaller than Jack was and, in Arthur’s own words, a little bit bigger than Isaac had been. Her hair is just like Abigail’s; dark and thick and with a penchant for standing on edge. Her eyes are blue, just like Abigail’s too, and John holds them both throughout the night and lets Uncle and Jack take care of most of the chores around the farm and the house just to stay behind and watch them.

He has his boy. And now he has his girls.

She doesn’t have a name until she’s almost two weeks and Uncle’s gotten tired of saying baby over and over when referring to her and Jack’s list of names have run out, and so John looks through some books he comes across whenever he’s in Blackwater, asks a couple of ladies what they find as a fitting name for a girl with lungs that could scream for days but he doesn’t get much of a decent answer.

Eventually, he finds himself flicking through Arthur’s journal, the man grumbling in the corner and staring out the window. John can only imagine what goes through his head, and most of his thoughts goes to Isaac and his momma. Maybe he’d have named her Eliza, it’s a pretty enough name, but it didn’t seem so fitting since the man who’d loved an Eliza was stood close enough to hear every thought in his head.

“Y’know, you could just go.” He says and lowers the journal a little to look at him, and Arthur’s dim eyes finds his and he lifts the corners of his lips just a smidge; enough for a smile, not enough for a full reply.

John doesn’t expect a reply, so doesn’t bother prying for one.

He goes to close the journal and go back out to Abigail with what little imagination he’s found, when something peeks out from behind the pages. He picks it out with gentle fingers, afraid to crumble the thin paper, and finds a small drawing made on perhaps the thinnest piece of paper John’s ever seen.

“You drew this?” He asks in a mumble and this time Arthur moves and goes over to him, peeks over his shoulder and musters a huff. He’d grown solemn since the whole thing with Micah and Dutch, the former thankfully having had enough brains not to show up and get into a forever-fight with Arthur, and John had learned not to expect too many words out of his mouth.

It’s a woman. She looks kind, with a rounded face and almond eyes, hair behind her head in a loose braid with soft curls wisping about her face. There’re no colors, but he can, in a way, see the blue of her eyes and the dark of her hair, and he knows who she is before Arthur finds the voice required to speak.

 _“‘s my momma. Long time ago, though.”_ He says, the smile on his face telling John all he needs to know.  _“It’s good name, if ye’re still lookin’.”_ He adds, the creases on his pale face disappearing when he’s once again lost in memories of times long since passed.

“What was she like?” John asks, curious, because even if Arthur’s willing to give up his momma’s name, doesn’t mean John have good thoughts about the woman who died before Arthur joined Dutch and Hosea on the road.

 _“Kind._ _Didn’t matter what I’d’ve done. She was always kind. Harsh when she needed to be, but she didn’t have a mean bone in her body I reckon’. Least not ‘til my daddy had the stomach to turn up drunk.”_ John smiled at that, whispered her name and nodded.

“If you’ll allow it.” He says and Arthur nods back.  _“That little girl better be nothin’ but good, Marston, or I’ll haunt ya ‘til the day you die.”_ John simply scoffs, puts the drawing carefully back in the book and closes it, leaves it on the nightstand and leaves to find Abigail on the porch.

He finds her there, nursing, softly cooing at their little girl. Her black hair is hidden in a little hat, the brim folded up over her forehead to give her eyes access to the whole world, something John is more than willing to give her. Abigail looks up at him when he comes, smiles brightly and rocks them both back and forth.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” she starts and locks her eyes with his. “How about Susan?” She asks and even though her smile is still bright, it’s a little tired. Tired of being up at every hour of the night, and perhaps tired of picking and choosing when the world is full of names.

Jack had been easy. It’d been simple; John Marston Jr. John became Jack and that was that. And since John had left them for a year it didn’t seem to have made much of a difference; there’d always be a Marston at camp. This one was, hopefully, much smarter than his father.

“It’s pretty.” He says and lowers himself in the chair next to her and traces their daughter’s brow gently with his fingertips. “But..?” She asks, head bent in question.

“Beatrice.” He says and there’s a moment where the world goes quiet and he’s ready to turn back and suggest that Susan would be perfect, when Abigail laughs and nods down at their little girl.

“It’s perfect.” She whispers and tucks the girl against her chest, hugging her closely and looks up at John, still nodding.

“Beatrice Susan Marston.” They both say, fumbles a bit with it, and then there’s another moment where there’s only the three of them in the whole world. And then Uncle shouts from the barn for Jack or John or God to come help him with the jugs of milk.

“Leave it, Uncle. Come on over here.” John calls and watches how Uncle almost topples the jugs in his escape to freedom while Jack pours out the rest of the chicken feed and jumps the fence.

Uncle looks almost dazed with joy about being out of his required misery while Jack almost looks a little sad to have had to leave the chickens, but John thinks little of it when he waves them up on the porch once Abigail’s covered herself up again.

“You got a name for her, Pa?” Jack asks, knowing almost immediately what that smile on his mother’s face means, and leans against one of the posts. He hadn’t been carrying jugs of milk, but the sun weren’t always kind to the chicken coop, no matter where they would’ve put it once they built it, so Jack’s brow is slick with sweat while Uncle’s shirt is drenched.

(John thinks, has thought before, that they must look like a sorry bunch to anyone passing through, but right now he doesn’t think anything of it.)

“Her name’s Beatrice.” Abigail says and nods toward Jack, who scurries forward and takes his baby sister gently in his arms, his eyes so much like hers in all but color. “Beatrice.” He breathes and the baby blinks up at him, reaches a chubby hand and grabs at his nose with greedy fingers.

It’s Uncle that breaks the tender moment by clapping his hands once, declare that the rest of the day should be spent resting in celebration of the “new arrival”.

“Once you’ve cleared the pails on the wagon and driven it into town, sure.” Is John's reply as Uncle grumbles while he can just faintly hear Arthur laugh in the back.

***

October’s always been a wretched month and this one’s not any different. A storm rips a branch far enough to wreck a hole in the roof of the barn that takes over a week to fix properly and breaks a fence post that has them search the woods for three days for a missing bull.

The crops survive, what little they know how to plant, and Arthur is as helpful as always by simply yelling directions in which the bull might’ve gone or how John might do next year with the sowing of his crops. He only scoffs at John’s offer of a bullet in the foot if he doesn’t shut up.

The house survives with only a shattered window and then they don’t think much of anything past that which they have to fix.

And then comes the coughs.

It stops John dead in his tracks just as it does Arthur and they both turn on point, at the same time, to look at the small body kneeling in the dirt with a stable built of twigs laid out on the ground and horses made out of pinecones. The make-believe sounds of horses and hooves come in intervals with the wet coughs and the smearing of snot on the back of a hand.

“You alright, sweetheart?” John asks and approaches, bends down to his daughter’s height. She’s two, so close to three, and she smiles just as crookedly as John does at times and laughs just like Abigail, but the voice is so unmistakably young Jack’s.

“‘m fine, Pa.” She says and looks back down to her “horse”. “You sure? Think momma should have a look at that cough.” He says and grips her under her armpits and lifts her into his arms. She’s hot to the touch and for once doesn’t squirm and complain, and simply leans her head into his neck, something she very rarely does.

“Little tired.” She mumbles, the pinecone still in her hand. John takes it from her and sets it down just inside the door and calls for Abigail down the hall. She’s there in moments, already knowing that it’s time to put Beatrice to bed, but John’s face has her stop in her tracks and tilt her head to the side.

“She was coughin’ outside. Little too hot, too.” He says and Abigail steps forward and presses a hand to her daughter’s forehead and sees how her little eyes are a bit glazed. “How you feelin’?” She asks and bends to see her properly and the little girl pouts a bit and sniffles.

Admitting things to momma will always be most kids’ favorite past time, while admitting to Pa was at the very bottom of things to do together with fishing and hunting. “Well, then we’ll fix you up a bath and then you’ll go right to bed, alright?” Abigail says and takes her from John arms, their eyes meeting worriedly over her head as the girl takes up the same position in her mother’s arms as she had in her father’s.

John meets Arthur’s eyes over both of their heads, and he’s seen Arthur multiple times looking the way he did before he walked up the path to Copperhead Landing, but never,  _never,_ had John seen him look just like that.

***

She’s sick for a week. And then she gets better.

And in January, a few months before Edgar Ross makes his reappearance, John Marston carves a marker out of the finest wood he could find and fights the flow of tears that never seems to stop. There’s no valve to turn to make it all stop; it comes as it pleases, and there isn’t anything he can do to stop it.

His knife slips once or twice, cracks the wood he’s sawed out, and he curses his own craftsmanship more than necessary when he suddenly feels the soft breeze of something cold against his cheek. And then he can hardly breathe.

He stabs the knife into the ground, wedges it into the space between the cracked wood and the dry earth, the barn abandoned for now and  _begs._

“Please. Please, Beatrice.” He pleads and the wind dies down for a bit, before something jostles on the ground and forces his eyes open and makes him peer between his fingers. The wood moves, slightly, just so that it shifts around on the ground.

 _“Why you sad?”_ She asks and John rocks back on his heels, away from his knees and ends up on his rear, hands turned into fists and tears flowing ever freer now. He refuses to look,  _can’t_ look, and he shakes his head from side to side when the cold creeps up his spine like ice water and he keeps begging.

Begs her to come back. Begs her to go.

“You shouldn’t be here, Beatrice.” He whispers and he feels how the wind stops again.  _“You’re here, Pa.”_ She replies and John shoots to his feet in a flash and is across the room before he realizes that maybe he shouldn’t have done that when his _dead_ _daughter_ , who’s never witnessed a bad thing in her life, stands there and expects him to have an answer.

 _“Your Pa needs some time, ‘s all, sweetheart.”_ Comes another voice and John turns away from the pen he’s leaned himself against and sees Arthur’s broad back shield him from the sight of his own daughter. He hiccups into his fist, swallows the lump in his throat and tries to keep looking when Beatrice speaks up;

 _“Who are you?”_ She asks, so young and innocent, and John wishes that he was dead too. Maybe then he’d have taken Arthur’s place. Maybe then he’d have been the one comforting his daughter. But right now, she was the only one that didn’t need comfort.

That was Abigail and Jack and Uncle and John, Missus Barnes and her kid down in Blackwater who’d now lost a playmate and it was also Reverend Johnson because he had to come to Beecher’s Hope and perform a sermon, witnessed by both the living and the dead

 _“I’m your Uncle Arthur.”_ He says and John can hear the sound she makes from in front of him, all young innocence and understanding that neither of them most likely had at that age. She knew  _of_ him, but how much, no one could be quite sure.

But she still knew him.

 _“Maybe we oughta leave yer daddy to it, huh?”_ John sees the black mass of hair fly into his field of view as she turns her head in wonder and Arthur straightens, holds out a hand and John watches his little girl snake her fingers through his much bigger ones and lead him out toward where Rachel had a foal last summer. Arthur nods once, solemn as always, and then John’s alone again.

The wind’s nothing more than a whisper now.

He stands bent by the pen for a while until he hears the barn door creak open and watches as a lantern dances in the dark. She’s dressed in her nightgown, shawl over her shoulders and her hair a mess. Beatrice had always looked like Abigail, but never had Abigail looked so much like Beatrice than she did in this moment.

She lowers the lantern to the floor, and she holds him, her tears dry, while he weeps into the crook of her arm. She doesn’t comfort, doesn’t sooth; just holds him like that until he’s quieted and they’re both kneeling on the floor.

John wants to apologize. He just doesn’t know what for.

“Should we do it together?” She asks, her voice a raspy whisper in the dark, and they both grip the knife he wedged in the floor and carve out the words on the last piece of plain wood John has left. It’s not perfect, but neither are they.

But she was.

John thinks, later when they’re in bed and they listen for the sounds that won’t ever come back, that even if they weren’t perfect their kids were made from the only perfect parts of them.

They were as perfect as could be; some just happened to be better than others. And the kids were, almost, always better.

***

John lowers a flower onto the grave, burrows it into the small hole Abigail’s dug by the marker and buries it up with dirt, and steps back. The lily, white as cotton, stands out among the blue daisies Missus Barnes put there and the dark wood of the marker and the dirt on which all of it stands.

(The dirt which now holds his daughter.)

He’d spoken to Arthur the day after; had taken Rachel and her foal on their very delayed morning ride to see the sights and ridden until the stallion couldn’t keep up and stopped in the middle of the road, sneering in a way that only a horse could. He’d spoken to Arthur then, who had reassured him more than once that Beatrice wasn’t there.

That he’d seen her off himself and that she didn’t seem to know what had happened or why John had been the way he was; she had simply smiled like only a child could, shaken his hand with childish grace and that’d been it.

John had seen few children go, especially someone as young as that, so he wasn’t quite sure whether or not Arthur was telling the truth.

But John had taken his word for it, because Beatrice was nowhere to be seen on the day the Reverend came and John found it a wonder that he still had a tear left to shed. He felt drained and broken in ways no one should be, and he wonders idly how many times he’ll find himself up here, be it night or day, and how many days it’ll take him to fully comprehend that Abigail will only have to call three of them to dinner and wake two of them up with the smell of coffee in the morning, coffee being something Beatrice had liked just fine.

She’s not there anymore.

And maybe that’s a mercy in itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beatrice, a form of the name Beatrix, is based on late latin meanings of “voyager, traveler” and came to mean, in later translations, “blessed, happy”, and Susan, a form of Susanna, means "lily" or "rose" depending on your hebrew translation
> 
> (And I thought writing the earlier chapter was hard! I'll admit, without hesitation, that I was so close to tears while writing this at 1am. This whole story is a giant clusterfuck of emotions, so I'm not doing myself any favors.
> 
> Also, emotions aside, kids are really hard to write, so I hope I got something right even if she wasn't at the center a whole lot!)


	8. VIII. linden crowned king

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s Dutch.
> 
> It’s always Dutch.
> 
> Dutch with the words and the ways and the promises and the world. Always been, always will be.
> 
> John didn’t believe in much after the gang and after Beatrice, but he’d always believed in Dutch. One way or another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never thought I'd be able to write this many chapters, even if there basically just retellings but still, in a week. Thank you guys so much for reading!
> 
> I'll tell you guys right now that I haven't played the first Red Dead Redemption, only seen playthroughs and read about the missions, so any inaccuracies are mine and you're allowed to tell me what I did wrong, even though I've tweaked canon a bit on the nose.

John had seen a lot of people go in his time; friends, family, enemies. Some had stayed behind, some had left, some had never arrived at the apparent last stop before eternity that was John Marston.

Some were smart. Some were just plain stupid.

And John was adamant in his belief that Arthur was among the most stupid folk he’d ever met. At least until he met Bill Williamson again, aimed a rifle at him, and pulled the trigger.

Bill’s always been a fool, a bigger one than them it seemed most of the time, but John didn’t know he could be this Goddamn stupid. It takes him three days to locate John, voice full of wrath and cold, and neither John nor Arthur are quite sure why he’s still around.

“You come to kill me, Bill?” John says, halting Bill’s tirade of old friends and unpaid debts. “If you have, then good luck.” John knows the dead man hasn’t seen the other dead man leaning in the corner, arms crossed, and brows furrowed in cold bemusement, and he waits as patiently as he can for the reaction to come.

It’s been years of John fighting and Arthur picking up the pieces only he could use, and by now they’re anything but unorganized. But, then again, they’d always been like that; the two of them against the rest of the Goddamn world when the walls of the camp wasn’t there and there was only you, yourself and a gun.

It’s a little trickier when the other person’s dead, but Arthur doesn’t seem willing to leave at any point, so John has stopped questioning him.

Bill’s dead eyes darken under bushy brows and he waves his hand out in a motion that could be considered threatening, but falls once he sees just exactly who is glaring daggers into his back. John recognizes the look too well; the look of a gut punch that could bring either of them to their knees.

 _“Arthur?”_ He says and he suddenly sounds real small, as if he hadn’t ever imagined that the man was still around or even dead at all.  _“Hello, Bill._ _Thought you’d move on from this by now.”_ Arthur muses and adjust his thumbs in his gun belt. There are no guns there and the knife’s gone, but he still has that habit of looking threatening even disarmed.

 _“Ain’t you supposed to be dead, old man?”_ Bill seethes and whips around, hand reaching for his empty holster.  _“Sure, I am, boy. So are you.”_ Arthur takes a step forward around the end of the bed and stops short of Bill.  _“But we’re both still here. How’d you think that happened?”_ Arthur nods his head once to the side and Bill’s eyes travel from Arthur and over to John and then back again.

 _“What’re you talkin’ about?_ Him? _He_ shot  _me!”_ Bill’s voice raises and Arthur smiles, grim and tightlipped, and nods.  _“That he did. Shot Micah, too.”_ Arthur takes another step and claps Bill over the shoulder, freezing momentarily over the act of actually being able to touch something again, and locks his eyes with Bill’s.  _“He coulda shot Javier, but he’s actually not as dumb as he looks.”_

 _“Now, I actually believed you for a while to be smarter than Micah and stay as far away from this little stop along the way as possible, but seems I was wrong.”_ He says and John quirks a smile in the corner of his lips.  _“So, why don’t you tell us where Dutch is holed up and then scurry off into whatever hole they put you in?”_

Bill all but stutters, looks around for something or other for some mean of escape, and eventually seems to decide that stepping back is as good as it gets.  _“I don’t know where he is.”_

“You sure about that? Ross seemed sure that you or Javier did, and Javier ain’t talkin’.” John raises from his chair and cocks his head to the side in thought. “Now, we have a lead, but I’m not gettin’ my family back unless I get Dutch. And right now, you’re the only one I can talk to.”

John pauses but doesn’t look away from Bill. Faltering now would only bring that crazed, dead look in Bill’s eyes to a full stop and God knows what would happen then; “you said you’d fucked her. Seems sufficient enough for you to care.”

There’s a wall of ice pressed against John’s chest and if the dead had any breaths, then John would smell all kinds of awful things coming from Bill’s open mouth. It only lasts two seconds and then he’s being hauled back by the neck by Arthur, the embers glistening in his own dark eyes. He tosses him as best he can, given that Bill is significantly bigger in body mass than Arthur ever was, and John takes short, curt breaths to keep the chill from fully taking over the lungs he needs to speak.

 _“Yeah, I fucked her. But that don’t mean nothin’.”_ He spits and looks John over with a look of disgust. They’d never had the highest of opinions of each other, but that wasn’t a look John was too familiar with when it came to Bill Williamson

 _“We asked you a question,_ Marion, _now cough it up.”_

_“I already said; I don’t know where he is.”_

John’s never known how to expel a ghost; they only ever did whatever they pleased when John was around, but he really wished for something at this point. “Why’re you even here, Bill? Hate me that much, don’t ya?”

 _“What does that mean? I’m here just like the rest of ya, only I never saw you on the guest list.”_ He turns and sneers at Arthur, who chooses only to scoff in reply.  “You said I shot you. I did. Fatally.” Bill, ever the blockhead, frowns again and keeps reaching for a gun that isn’t there.

“You’re dead, Bill. So’s he.”

Let’s just say that there are better ways to break those kinds of news to someone who was just shot by a former brother.

***

They find Dutch and John is almost prepared for Hosea to step around the corner and demand peace and the first steps of an escape plan and for Arthur to prepare the dynamite, but no such thing happens and then there’s a dead girl in John’s arms and Arthur’s out the door.

John has half a mind to call out to him, but decides against it and he follows him out with the law on his tail and chases after the man he’d once trusted above all else. Arthur keeps raging at nothing when the automobile is wrecked, and Dutch is gone.

And then Dutch’s there again, in Blackwater once again of all places, and Arthur is prepared to have another shouting match before John coaxes himself and the professor out a back door and on the road to freedom. Arthur meets him again, later, and it’s been a long time since John has seen his brother look so broken.

“We’ll get him.” John says and looks for Arthur’s eyes, who meets him after seconds of hesitation, says;  _“that’s what I’m afraid of.”_ and disappears into the breeze.

John’ll never understand the ways of being dead, but he sure as shit isn’t looking forward to it.

***

It’s Dutch.

It’s always Dutch.

Dutch with the words and the ways and the promises and the world. Always been, always will be.

John didn’t believe in much after the gang and after Beatrice, but he’d always believed in Dutch. One way or another.

Dutch had been called a messiah by some and someone had once called him a prophet, but to John, and to Arthur, he’d only ever been a father and a friend. And then a snake lured him to the finest of apples and now here they are.

Arthur had told John as much as he remembered of the time before life became vacant death, and so John isn’t too surprised when Arthur hangs back and watch. It was a mountain, a chilled wind, and the promise of something lost and never to be regained.

Few things are justified in their world. Even fewer things are forgiven.

But what John sees in Dutch’s eyes before their guns are gone and Dutch delivers yet another truth, is something calm and collected; the knowledge of defeat isn’t there. It’s only the simplicity of life that they both see. Because if there is one thing Dutch Van der Linde oftentimes seems to be, it is  _right._

Neither of them lost. Neither of them won. They simply drew a ceasefire in an unwinnable war where everyone’s an enemy.

Their time’s passed. It’s been for a very long time.

***

John’s learnt to stop expecting dead folk to simply move on, so he’s more annoyed than angry when he sees Dutch kick around the few crops Uncle managed to salvage.

 _“Y’know, I was never really sure about Uncle’s value half the time, but I think this settles it. What’s this supposed to be anyway?”_ He asks and John simply walks past, shakes his head and hefts a haybale under an arm on his way to the new cattle. Arthur seems to be doing a better job at avoiding Dutch by simply standing next to him and ignoring every word that leaves his mouth, while John throws the occasional glance his way for fear of this being yet another lie.

Yes, they’d both loved him, but that didn’t matter much when time had turned him into a damn nuisance.

 _“I think I prefer Uncle better.”_ Arthur mumbles more than once, something that is always followed by;  _“I heard that.”_ and John’s imagination of Hosea’s chuckling.

***

He was mad when he was alive and he remains mad once dead, but his eyes are still, quiet and almost looks more alive than most others. His voice is quiet, lips mouthing hidden truths, and John can’t escape the smile that plays there when he sees Ross cross the border to his home and Uncle crumples to the ground by Jack.

"You're useless." John bellows at Dutch, not caring one tiny bit over the men shooting at him hearing, and the man, the mirage, just throws out his arms and laughs because of course he's useless. _"I'm dead, son! Ain't nothin' I can do for you now that I woulda done then."_ And now John scowls again and wishes he was shouting at someone living, but everyone still alive is against him and they don't exactly take orders from him anymore.   
  
Arthur, being as helpful as he's usually come to be, shouts directions where he cannot pick up arms and he seems just about ready to throw Dutch from the Goddamn silo when the mirage laughs once again as a bullet tears a hole in John's hat.

 _“Either shut up, or do_ somethin’, _old man.”_ Arthur calls back, flickers out of John’s sight and in the next instance two agents drop the ground in violent enough spasms. Rarely had he seen ghosts so at work, and now that he does he’s mighty glad that the one doing it is on his side.

The living against the dead. How’s that for philosophy?

Dutch is still shouting outside the door and Arthur tries his best to get the man to do other things than preach to men who can’t hear him, when John kisses Abigail goodbye and shoos them out of the barn. He shuts up, though, when Arthur appears in the barn and all John can do is look.

“Alright.” He whispers to himself and presses flat palms over rough wooden doors. He sees, but doesn’t look, locks eyes with Arthur once again and they nod as one.

He’s afraid. Maybe he’s always been.

But at least he ain’t alone.

They’re brothers. Even after one is gone, and so Arthur claps him on the shoulder, smiles that telltale half smirk of sadness and joy he usually carried around, and tells him it's time to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Van der Linde, another form of the Dutch surname Van der Linden, means “from the linden tree” in Dutch/German and Arthur, once again, means king
> 
> I tried to get John somewhere in the title, but this sounded a little better I guess
> 
> There's also only one chapter remaining!


	9. IX. paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beecher’s Hope is home until it’s not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ties into my other RDR2 story; "once and true", but there's no need to read that to know what's happening here!

Beecher’s Hope is home until it’s not.

Pa and Uncle’s gone and momma’s always sad, and Jack  _tries,_ he really does, to be the man Pa wanted him to be; good and with a heart.

But Jack learns, when the new Reverend in town talks over momma’s grave and Missus Barnes puts down one of the yellow flowers that grew along the road, that a gunslinger with nothing but revenge on his mind has no place for goodness and hearts.

Maybe, when he’s done, he’ll have that. But not right now.

He remembers little of the time before it was just the three of them. He remembers enough to have some kind of fondness for those long gone, but it’s not enough to save him from remembering the  _awful_ things. The good clouds the bad, someone said to momma once they’d buried Pa, but in Jack’s mind that was nothing but bullshit. But he remembers enough of Uncle Arthur’s jokes and Uncle Charles, who hears of Pa’s passing and comes running like someone set his rear on fire, and the kindness of Uncle Hosea to know that once upon a time, it’d been better.

He doesn’t remember Aunt Karen’s drunken singing, Young Lenny’s laugh or the calmness that used to follow Uncle Dutch’s music. But, he does remember Mean Micah’s scolding and the last yappings of a dog that never came once called and he remembers the men by the lakeside.

Jack believes enough, that’s something that can be said, so he believes in what little he remembers of Reverend Swanson’s tirades of the possibilities of something that would come after. He believes enough to see home, as it was; tents, campfires, parties and laughter. The smiles and the drinks. Jack can almost imagine having grown up like that instead of running for his life and having to bury Pa on their own land.

(Jack remembers Uncle having said something about the big saloon in the sky, laughed himself silly and knocked himself out against Mister Pearson’s wagon, and if Jack could hope for others; well, that’s what he hopes.)

He shakes hands, nods his head in greetings and goodbyes and thank yous’, and goes back inside; takes his gun and Pa’s hat, the photograph of momma and Pa and himself and Beatrice and tucks it into Uncle Arthur’s old journal and leaves on the horse born the summer before Beatrice passed.

Beecher’s Hope is home until it isn’t.

 

***

 

It’s not difficult to find Ross. It should be, but it isn’t.

Retired and old. All the things Pa should be but never were.

Memory is a fragile thing that will disappear once you think too hard. Mistakes are the other way around; think about them, and they just might be worse than they actually are.

Jack remembers Ross. Ross remembers Jack.

Jack and Ross remember Pa.

(They both remember Uncle Arthur.)

They both shoot a gun and only one of them dies and Jack is suddenly so very, very cold, but he turns his back, holsters the gun and rides off into what is no more. The world is coming back from its slumber beyond the hills, where no memory exist and where people such as those Jack Marston once knew are long gone. He rides and meets the future somewhere along the way.

He wanders the streets of Saint Denis in search of potential bounties and nothings, and stumble upon a woman who calls him his father’s name. He tips his head, shakes his head and leaves her alone, the little girl tucked into the folds of her skirt.

She calls him his own name, but by then, he’s long gone.

 

***

 

He stumbles more than runs, straight into Missus Sadie on a job near the border.

The War’s done and over and he has scars so similar to his father’s that it seems to take her a moment to wrap her mind around that it’s Marston Junior standing in front of her, bent double where she kneed him after he took a tumble over her camp.

She’s older, but so’s he, and there’s a scar across her cheek and over her knuckles; no doubt from a brawl or two in a South American pub. She laughs and outstretches a hand, shakes it once and asks questions of life.

She doesn’t ask about death, but something still hovers over Jack’s shoulder when she stops for breath. It feels almost as if though the wind wishes for him to speak for it, but Jack can’t speak  _‘wind’,_ so he simply gives her a smile and accepts her offer of a campfire to rest by and even some meager food collected from the scarce provisions she owns.

She knows Pa’s dead, and Uncle too. Momma had told her as such, but Jack’s the one to tell her that momma’s gone now too and that the bastard Ross floats down the San Luis. She simply nods and says she heard about Ross. She doesn’t speak of momma, and Jack is grateful enough to accept the rabbit she shoves in his hands.

He leaves her there and goes back North, meets the strange Missus who introduces herself as Mary Gillis-Johns, and Jack knows he’s heard the name before, but he doesn’t ask her why.

(He reads Uncle Arthur’s journal later, in the lamplight of Saint Denis, and chuckles lightly over his uncle’s visions of love for a woman that seemed to love him still.)

 

***

 

It had been the Great War.

The War to end all Wars.

Bullshit.

He’s built himself a cabin in the woods of Missouri when the letter comes to his postbox in town and he breaks a hole in the door. He shouts loud enough for the neighbor further up the path to come sprinting to see whether or not Jack’s finally gotten himself killed in his ill-fated attempts at shooting the wolf that’s been hunting their cattle for the last month, but they both simply wave letters in each other’s faces, ponders over throwing them into the fire and eventually accept, over far too many bottles of whiskey, that at least they’ll have a familiar face to punch if it gets too much.

He writes Charles, something he’s tried to do since momma’s death, and tells him he’ll go save the poor bastards in the East and he gets nothing but guilt in reply; Charles’s son is going. His daughter’s husband’s going too.

(Jack Marston breaks his knuckles when he punches a second hole through the door.)

 

***

 

Jack’s never been to Uncle Arthur’s grave, but he does finally go when he stumbles, yet again, into the path of Missus Gillis-Johns; widow twice over. She offers to take him there, she knows the path well enough by now, and they both find a grave that was never meant to exist all the way up here.

Jack remembers Uncle Arthur’s love of the West. The East isn’t where he belongs. (Neither does Jack, but he’ll go anyway.) There are flowers planted, yellow and orange and blue and white, and Missus Gillis-Johns cries even after all the time, and Jack can’t quite understand what it would be like to love someone still, so long after they’d gone.

(He supposes momma had an idea, but she only spent three years without Pa, and she had grieved him long before that.)

He says goodbye to her, shakes her hand again and is tugged into a hug, the old woman stronger than he would expect of her. He lets himself be held, breaks just a little over other matters than Uncle Arthur, and says goodbye to her again with the wave of a hand over the brim of his father’s hat.

It might be the last time they meet. It might not be. He doesn’t know life, death or time enough to tell.

It’s still weeks before he’s off to Basic; before he’s forced to protect something he’s not quite sure he believes in, and he borrows a horse from the stable in Blackwater and rides across what’s left of the plains to get to what once was home; because getting there on anything but a horse sounds a bit like making Pa twist in his grave.

The house still stands, a little lopsided and a little less home, and Jack finds himself lingering. There’s nothing left in the house for him, nothing he wants, so he simply trudges past and up the hill.

At one point, he’d decided that something should be built around them. He’d always been a poor woodworker, a little bit like Pa, but he’d built enough of a fence for people to leave the graves alone. There are still some flowers there, though, planted by those that knew them or simply wished to be kind.

Beatrice’s marker is a little broken, the plaque barely holding itself up in the dusty weather of West Elizabeth, and Uncle’s and Pa’s have crooked spines. Momma’s still standing, its backbone as straight as hers always was, and Jack brushes twigs and leaves from hidden bones.

What once was home is no longer home, but something remembers; something remains. Something’s still here, something as light as a breeze and as cold as ice, even when the heat is otherwise stifling.

But Jack Marston’s been cold his whole life; always bundled up during spring and autumn and covered in every blanket in the house come winter. The wind’s not the thing that tries to speak to him; it’s simply a messenger.

Jack Marston’s clever, always been, but not enough to understand.

“Sorry, Pa.” He whispers and traces his father’s words, gets up and leaves the way he came.

There’s a wolf howling further away once the breeze dies down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's that folks! Hope you enjoyed it, because I really enjoyed writing it (apart from the sad parts, which were EVERYWHERE!)


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